The American lady protested.
"I don't want a German sentry," I said. "I shouldn't know what to do with a German sentry if I had one."
So he sat down and explained his method to me. I wish I could tell his method here. It sounded so easy. Evidently it was a safety-valve, during that long wait of the deadlock, for his impetuous temperament. One could picture him sitting in his trench day after day among the soldiers who adored him, making little water-colour sketches and smoking his bulldog pipe, and then suddenly, as now, rising and stretching his long arms and saying:
"Well, boys, I guess I'll go out and bring one in."
And doing it.
I was taken for a tour of the house—up a broken staircase that hung suspended, apparently from nothing, to what had been the upper story.
It was quite open to the sky and the rain was coming in. On the side toward the German line there was no wall. There were no partitions, no windows, only a few broken sticks of what had been furniture. And in one corner, partly filled with rain water, a child's cradle that had miraculously escaped destruction.
Downstairs to the left of the corridor was equal destruction. There was one room here that, except for a great shell-hole and for a ceiling that was sagging and almost ready to fall, was intact. Here on a stand were surgical supplies, and there was a cot in the corner. A soldier had just left the cot. He had come up late in the afternoon with a nosebleed, and had now recovered.
"It has been a light day," said my guide. "Sometimes we hardly know which way to turn—when there is much going on, you know. Probably to-night we shall be extremely busy."
We went back into the living room and I consulted my watch. It was half past ten o'clock. At eleven the bombardment was to begin!