An odd scent of roasted apples catches us by the throat; our eyes begin to stream in a detestable fashion. "Look out for the acid drops!" cries our major. We know this bit of soldiers' slang, which means the lachrymatory shells. We quickly put on our masks. In perfect safety, crouched against the wall of the trench, in the company of a hundred unknown comrades, we wait until the poisonous gust of yellow smoke has blown away. Through the eye-pieces of our masks everything seems to be enveloped in some fabulous steam; the pale lightning of the guns, the ghastly discs of the English rockets, the red stars of the German. But one sound: the clatter of the machine-guns near us, a muffled thunder as of a rising sea.
In this muddy ditch we are like some lost gang of divers.
And in the meantime, 100 yards ahead of us, in the midst of choking gases and the tempest of the machine-guns, soldiers—heroes—have never ceased their work.
They hammer nails, they drive in stakes, they sink piles, they knot together into spider nets the tangled strands of the barbed wire. All honour to them! These are the Supermen.
[CHAPTER IV.]
SURPRISES OF A MOONLIT FROSTY NIGHT.
A true Walpurgis Night of heroes and warriors. It is not on the summit of the Brocken that I have witnessed it, but, looking out over the plain of the Ancre, from a tree. This tree, every evening, is wreathed with the fumes of asphyxiating shells. Its woolly streamers of shrapnel smoke are like the foliage around a heraldic crown.
As soon as twilight is come, aeroplanes cross the neighbouring lines and attack this tree with their machine-guns. It is treated like a combatant. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret of its clumsy strength and beauty. It stands upon its hill, solid and straight. It holds its ground as few men could do. It is a French ash that stands upon the field of battle in the very middle of the British Army.
It has become an observation post. One climbs it by a straight ladder 160 feet long. In its highest fork one of the engineers has made a wooden box, bound together with barbed wire, with a little canvas to hide it. Field-glasses, maps, range-finders are there. All the gusts of the autumnal breeze blow through it. Up here, too, men are pitched about as if they were in the mizzen-top of a cruiser. Strange nest for war eagles!