Now to get to my dug-out. I walk quietly to the left behind a wall of sand-bags, then going through an opening, I run smartly for the hole, for machine-gun bullets are splitting the air. I have a bag in front of my dug-out, and a sheet of corrugated iron to keep in the light. All night long the guns boom, but you sleep all the same.
When we get our papers up a day afterwards, we read of this particular night a neutral paragraph, headed, 'A Quiet Night on the Western Front.'
II
NOTRE DAME DE DÉLIVRANCE
From city homes—from country homes we came;
From mother's love and father's gift we came,
A wind most terrible blew o'er earth's seas;
It waved a smouldering ash, and blazed up war;
The smoke and heat of that great Hell drew us,
And from our lives we came to live, to live.
From sluggish routine, sluggish wrong we came.