Very few sounds are to be heard. The farmers' dogs have long abandoned this unpeaceful country, and the crowing of the cocks, those earliest victims of every war, has even longer been stilled.
Silence reigns.
How is it, then, that this silence seems menacing? It only seems so. Stop a moment and listen. Do you not now hear in the darkness a host of little sounds? An invisible world is moving about us. Listen!
Yes, there is the sound of many feet on the road—not the brisk tramp of the parade ground, but the steps of the poor souls who are fighting their way through the mud. It is as if ten thousand little wings were flapping.
All lights are out. The long stream of motor-cars moves upon the road in perfect order. Midnight. Now the preparations for the advance are at their height. Now is the time when the reliefs come up, the blessed hour, so long expected by those who quit the trenches, by those who go into them so bravely met.
In their English helmets, which look like basins upside-down, caked with mud—already—to the eyes, with their rifles shouldered, slung, or carried in the hand, but each one carefully protected by its canvas cover, smoking their pipes, their chests thrown forward against the weight of their bursting haversacks, steady of step and bright of eye, the Tommies go forward to relieve their friends.
When they feel the need of a rest the men in khaki, quite regardless of the mud, throw themselves down on the sopping earth, and man, clothing, and soil become one. In this country of the dead you may hardly distinguish shadows from the objects which throw them.
Every now and then a despatch rider passes us—day and night, it is all one to these links in the chain of communication—a motor-cyclist, crouched over his handle-bar, hands and nose frozen, eyes red, his nerves on edge, skirting the side of the road, and sometimes remaining there, stuck. Or perhaps it is a horseman, leading his exhausted beast by its bridle, but determined, though he kill his horse, to get his work done before morning.
But now the horizon, black hitherto, lights up with flashes that seem to be lightning. These are followed by dull thuds. The British artillery has chosen this moment before the dawn to reawaken the Boche to the realisation of his own abominable existence.