We zigzagged into a cellar, and below the threshold of some one’s front door. The trench led directly under it. The house into which the door had opened was destroyed; possibly those who once had entered by it also were destroyed, and it now swung in air with men crawling like rats below it, its half-doors banging and groaning; the wind, with ghostly fingers, opening them to no one, closing them on nothing. The trench wriggled through a garden, and we could see flung across the narrow strip of sky above us, the branch of an apple-tree, and with one shoulder brushed the severed roots of the same tree. Then the trench led outward, and we passed beneath railroad tracks, the ties reposing on air, and supported by, instead of supporting, the iron rails.
We had been moving between garden walls, cellar walls; sometimes hidden by ruins, sometimes diving like moles into tunnels. We remained on no one level, or for any time continued in any one direction. It was entirely fantastic, entirely unreal. It was like visiting a new race of beings, who turn day into night; who, like bats, molochs, and wolves, hide in caves and shun the sunlight.
By the ray of an electric torch we saw where these underground people store their food. Where, against siege, are great casks of water, dungeons packed with ammunition, more dungeons, more ammunition. We saw, always by the shifting, pointing finger of the electric torch, sleeping quarters underground, dressing stations for the wounded underground. In niches at every turn were gas-extinguishers. They were as many, as much as a matter of course, as fire-extinguishers in a modern hotel. They were exactly like those machines advertised in seed catalogues for spraying fruit-trees. They are worn on the back like a knapsack. Through a short rubber hose a fluid attacks and dissipates the poison gases.
The sun set, and we proceeded in the light of a full moon. It needed only this to give to our journey the unreality of a nightmare. Long since I had lost all sense of direction. It was not only a maze and labyrinth, but it held to no level. At times, concealed by walls of chalk, we walked erect, and then, like woodchucks, dived into earthen burrows. For a long distance we crawled, bending double through a tunnel. At intervals lamps, as yet unlit, protruded from either side, and to warn us of these from the darkness a voice would call, “attention à gauche,” “attention à droite.” The air grew foul and the pressure on the ear-drums like that of the subway under the North River. We came out and drew deep breaths as though we had been long under water.
We were in the first trench. It was, at places, from three hundred to forty yards distant from the Germans. No one spoke, or only in whispers. The moonlight turned the men at arms into ghosts. Their silence added to their unreality. I felt like Rip Van Winkle hemmed in by the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson. From somewhere near us, above or below, to the right or left the “seventy-fives,” as though aroused by the moon, began like terriers to bark viciously. The officer in the steel casque paused to listen, fixed their position, and named them. How he knew where they were, how he knew where he was himself, was all part of the mystery. Rats, jet black in the moonlight, scurried across the open places, scrambled over our feet, ran boldly between them. We had scared them, perhaps, but not half so badly as they scared me.
We pushed on past sentinels, motionless, silent, fatefully awake. The moonlight had turned their blue uniforms white and flashed on their steel helmets. They were like men in armor, and so still that only when you brushed against them, cautiously as men change places in a canoe, did you feel they were alive. At times, one of them thinking something in the gardens of barb-wire had moved, would loosen his rifle, and there would be a flame and flare of red, and then again silence, the silence of the hunter stalking a wild beast, of the officer of the law, gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of the burglar to betray his presence.
The next morning I called to make my compliments to General Franchet d’Espéray. He was a splendid person—as alert as a steel lance. He demanded what I had seen.
“Nothing!” he protested. “You have seen nothing. When you return from Serbia, come to Champagne again and I myself will show you something of interest.”
I am curious to see what he calls “something of interest.”
“I wonder what’s happening in Buffalo?”