"Wire would have stopped them just now. But we had no wire."
"And machine-guns, too! but where are they, the M.G.s?"
We have a distinct feeling that there has been an enormous blunder in the command. Want of foresight—the reënforcements were not there; they had not thought of supports. There were not enough guns to bar their way, nor enough artillery ammunition; with our own eyes we had seen two batteries cease fire in mid-action—they had not thought of shells. In a wide stretch of country, as one could see, there were no defense work, no trenches; they had not thought of trenches.
It is obvious even to the common eyes of common soldiers.
"What could we do?" says one of us; "it's the chiefs."
We say it and we should repeat it if we were not up again and swept away in the hustle of a fresh departure, and thrown back upon more immediate and important anxieties.
* * * * * *
We do not know where we are.
We have marched all night. More weariness bends our spines again, more obscurity hums in our heads. By following the bed of a valley, we have found trenches again, and then men. These splayed and squelched alleys, with their fat and sinking sandbags, their props which rot like limbs, flow into wider pockets where activity prevails—battalion H.Q., or dressing-stations. About midnight we saw, through the golden line of a dugout's half-open door, some officers seated at a white table—a cloth or a map. Some one cries, "They're lucky!" The company officers are exposed to dangers as we are, but only in attacks and reliefs. We suffer long. They have neither the vigil at the loophole, nor the knapsack, nor the fatigues. What always lasts is greater.
And now the walls of flabby flagstones and the open-mouthed caves have begun again. Morning rises, long and narrow as our lot. We reach a busy trench-crossing. A stench catches my throat: some cess-pool into which these streets suspended in the earth empty their sewage? No, we see rows of stretchers, each one swollen. There is a tent there of gray canvas, which flaps like a flag, and on its fluttering wall the dawn lights up a bloody cross.