It was very beautiful, but was it war? We might have been in the Adirondacks in the private camp of one of our men of millions. You expected to see the fire-warden’s red poster warning you to stamp out the ashes, and to be careful where you threw your matches. Then the path dived into a trench with pink walls, and, overhead, arches of green branches rising higher and higher until they interlocked and shut out the sky. The trench led to a barrier of logs as round as a flour-barrel, the openings plugged with moss, and the whole hidden in fresh pine boughs. It reminded you of those open barricades used in boar hunting, and behind which the German Emperor awaits the onslaught of thoroughly terrified pigs.
Like a bird’s nest it clung to the side of the hill, and, across a valley, looked at a sister hill a quarter of a mile away.
“On that hill,” said the colonel, “on a level with us, are the Germans.”
Had he told me that among the pine-trees across the valley Santa Claus manufactured his toys and stabled his reindeer I would have believed him. Had humpbacked dwarfs with beards peeped from behind the velvet tree trunks and doffed red nightcaps, had we discovered fairies dancing on the moss carpet, the surprised ones would have been the fairies.
In this enchanted forest to talk of Germans and war was ridiculous. We were speaking in ordinary tones, but in the stillness of the woods our voices carried, and from just below us a dog barked.
“Do you allow the men to bring dogs into the trenches?” I asked. “Don’t they give away your position?”
“That is not one of our dogs,” said the colonel. “That is a German sentry dog. He has heard us talking.”
“But that dog is not across that valley,” I objected. “He’s on this hill. He’s not two hundred yards below us.”
“But, yes, certainly,” said the colonel. Of the man on duty behind the log barrier he asked:
“How near are they?”