The communication trenches serve, however, for more purposes than for the passage of troops; during an attack the reserves wait there, packed tight as sardines in a tin. When a man lies down he lies on his mate, when he stands up, if he dare to do such a thing, he runs the risk of being blown to eternity by a shell. Rifles, packs, haversacks, bayonets, and men are all messed up in an intricate jumble, the reserves lie down like rats in a trap, with their noses to the damp earth, which always reminds me of the grave. For them there is not the mad exhilaration of the bayonet charge, and the relief of striking back at the aggressor. They lie in wait, helpless, unable to move backward or forward, ears greedy for the latest rumours from the active front, and hearts prone to feelings of depression and despair.
The man who is seized with cramp groans feebly, but no one can help him. To rise is to court death, as well as to displace a dozen grumbling mates who have inevitably become part of the human carpet that covers the floor of the trench. A leg moved disturbs the whole pattern; the sufferer can merely groan, suffer, and wait. When an attack is on the communication trenches are persistently shelled by the enemy with a view to stop the advance of reinforcements. Once our company lay in a trench as reserves for fourteen hours, and during that time upwards of two thousand shells were hurled in our direction, our trench being half filled with rubble and clay. Two mates, one on my right and one on my left, were wounded. I did not receive a scratch, and Stoner slept for eight whole hours during the cannonade; but this is another story.
Before coming out here I formed an imaginary picture of the trenches, ours and the enemy's, running parallel from the Vosges in the South to the sea in the North. But what a difference I find in the reality. Where I write the trenches run in a strange, eccentric manner. At one point the lines are barely eighty yards apart; the ground there is under water in the wet season; the trench is built of sandbags; all rifle fire is done from loop-holes, for to look over the parapet is to court certain death. A mountain of coal-slack lies between the lines a little further along, which are in "dead" ground that cannot be covered by rifle fire, and are 1,200 yards apart. It is here that the sniper plies his trade. He hides somewhere in the slack, and pots at our men from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn. He knows the range of every yard of our communication trenches. As we come in we find a warning board stuck up where the parapet is crumbling away. "Stoop low, sniper," and we crouch along head bent until the danger zone is past.
Little mercy is shown to a captured sniper; a short shrift and swift shot is considered meet penalty for the man who coolly and coldly singles out men for destruction day by day. There was one, however, who was saved by Irish hospitality. An Irish Guardsman, cleaning his telescopic-rifle as he sat on the trench banquette, and smoking one of my cigarettes told me the story.
"The coal slack is festooned with devils of snipers, smart fellows that can shoot round a corner and blast your eye-tooth out at five hundred yards," he said. "They're not all their ones, neither; there's a good sprinkling of our own boys as well. I was doing a wee bit of pot-shot-and-be-damned-to-you work in the other side of the slack, and my eyes open all the time for an enemy's back. There was one near me, but I'm beggared if I could find him. 'I'll not lave this place till I do,' I says to meself, and spent half the nights I was there prowlin' round like a dog at a fair with my eyes open for the sniper. I came on his post wan night. I smelt him out because he didn't bury his sausage skins as we do, and they stunk like the hole of hell when an ould greasy sinner is a-fryin'. In I went to his sandbagged castle, with me gun on the cock and me finger on the trigger, but he wasn't there; there was nothin' in the place but a few rounds of ball an' a half empty bottle. I was dhry as a bone, and I had a sup without winkin'. 'Mother of Heaven,' I says, when I put down the bottle, 'its little ye know of hospitality, stranger, leaving a bottle with nothin' in it but water. I'll wait for ye, me bucko,' and I lay down in the corner and waited for him to come in.
"But sorrow the fut of him came, and me waiting there till the colour of day was in the sky. Then I goes back to me own place, and there was he waiting for me. He only made one mistake, he had fallen to sleep, and he just sprung up as I came in be the door.
"Immediately I had him by the big toe. 'Hands up, Hans'! I said, and he didn't argue, all that he did was to swear like one of ourselves and flop down. 'Why don't ye bury yer sausages, Hans?' I asked him. 'I smelt yer, me bucko, by what ye couldn't eat. Why didn't ye have something better than water in yer bottle?' I says to him. Dang a Christian word would he answer, only swear, an swear with nothin' bar the pull of me finger betwixt him and his Maker. But, ye know, I had a kind of likin' for him when I thought of him comin' in to my house without as much as yer leave, and going to sleep just as if he was in his own home. I didn't swear back at him but just said, 'This is only a house for wan, but our King has a big residence for ye, so come along before it gets any clearer,' and I took him over to our trenches as stand-to was coming to an end."
Referring again to our trenches there is one portion known to me where the lines are barely fifty yards apart, and at the present time the grass is hiding the enemy's trenches; to peep over the parapet gives one the impression of looking on a beautiful meadow splashed with daisy, buttercup, and poppy flower; the whole is a riot of colour—crimson, heliotrope, mauve, and green. What a change from some weeks ago! Then the place was littered with dead bodies, and limp, lifeless figures hung on to the barbed wire where they had been caught in a mad rush to the trenches which they never took. A breeze blows across the meadow as I write, carrying with it the odour of death and perfumed flowers, of aromatic herbs and summer, of desolation and decay. It is good that Nature does her best to blot out all traces of the tragedy between the trenches.
There is a vacant spot in our lines, where there is no trench and none being constructed; why this should be I do not know. But all this ground is under machine-gun fire and within rifle range. No foe would dare to cross the open, and the foe who dared would never live to get through. Further to the right, is a pond with a dead German stuck there, head down, and legs up in air. They tell me that a concussion shell has struck him since and part of his body was blown over to our lines. At present the pond is hidden and the light and shade plays over the kindly grasses that circle round it. On the extreme right there is a graveyard. The trench is deep in dead men's bones and is considered unhealthy. A church almost razed to the ground, with the spire blown off and buried point down in the earth, moulders in ruins at the back. It is said that the ghosts of dead monks pray nightly at the shattered altar, and some of our men state that they often hear the organ playing when they stand as sentries on the banquette.
"The fire trench to-night," said Stoner that evening, a nervous light in his soft brown eyes, as he fumbled with the money on the card table. His luck had been good, and he had won over six francs; he generally loses. "Perhaps we're in for the high jump when we get up there."