CHAPTER VII
Nicolete
For the following week the four girls were too busy to think of anything save their hospital work and their household responsibilities.
But one afternoon about four o’clock one of their officer friends suggested that they pay a visit to the French line of trenches in their immediate neighborhood. Not the firing line, but the second line trenches where the reserve soldiers slept, ate, smoked their cigarettes and even edited a daily paper.
For some little time there had been a lull in the fighting, so there could be little danger in such a tour of inspection. Yet if there had been, the Red Cross girls would have given it scant thought. They were becoming so accustomed to the conditions of war that even Barbara Meade confessed herself a little less of a coward. Indeed, they were beginning to understand why many soldiers take their daily existence so calmly and cheerfully, until actually they are bored, or homesick, or both, unless fighting is going on or the prospects of it near.
Trenches, you probably know, are not arranged in parallel lines, the one exactly behind the other like long pieces of ribbon. They often form a series of intricate underground passages, some of them crossing and recrossing each other, so that in one battle front in France where there were one hundred and forty miles of trenches there were only twelve miles directly facing the enemy.
Naturally the Red Cross girls could only see a very small section of trench life during one afternoon’s visit.
“But the briefness of the excursion was the chief thing to recommend it,” Barbara Meade insisted afterwards, although interested at the time.
Following their soldier guide, the girls walked through a deep, wide tunnel with a wooden paving at the bottom, such as one used to see in old-time village streets.
Inside the light was dim and gray, broken by shafts of sunlight filtering down through flimsy roofs of straw and branches of trees, placed above the openings to conceal the French trenches from the German air scouts.