There were overhead guards against hand-bombs which disposed me to believe him, but what convinced me most was a corporal urging us in whispers not to talk so loud. The men were at dinner, and a good smell of food filled the trench. This was the first smell I had encountered in my long travels uphill—a mixed, entirely wholesome flavour of stew, leather, earth, and rifle-oil.
FRONT LINE PROFESSIONALS
A proportion of men were standing to arms while others ate; but dinner-time is slack time, even among animals, and it was close on noon.
"The Boches got their soup a few days ago," some one whispered. I thought of the pulverized hillside, and hoped it had been hot enough.
We edged along the still trench, where the soldiers stared, with justified contempt, I thought, upon the civilian who scuttled through their life for a few emotional minutes in order to make words out of their blood. Somehow it reminded me of coming in late to a play and incommoding a long line of packed stalls. The whispered dialogue was much the same: "Pardon!" "I beg your pardon, monsieur." "To the right, monsieur." "If monsieur will lower his head." "One sees best from here, monsieur," and so on. It was their day and night-long business, carried through without display or heat, or doubt or indecision. Those who worked, worked; those off duty, not five feet behind them in the dug-outs, were deep in their papers, or their meals or their letters; while death stood ready at every minute to drop down into the narrow cut from out of the narrow strip of unconcerned sky. And for the better part of a week one had skirted hundreds of miles of such a frieze!
The loopholes not in use were plugged rather like old-fashioned hives. Said the Colonel, removing a plug: "Here are the Boches. Look, and you'll see their sandbags." Through the jumble of riven trees and stones one saw what might have been a bit of green sacking. "They're about seven metres distant just here," the Colonel went on. That was true, too. We entered a little fortalice with a cannon in it, in an embrasure which at that moment struck me as unnecessarily vast, even though it was partly closed by a frail packing-case lid. The Colonel sat him down in front of it, and explained the theory of this sort of redoubt. "By the way," he said to the gunner at last, "can't you find something better than that?" He twitched the lid aside. "I think it's too light. Get a log of wood or something."
HANDY TRENCH-SWEEPERS
I loved that Colonel! He knew his men and he knew the Boches —had them marked down like birds. When he said they were beside dead trees or behind boulders, sure enough there they were! But, as I have said, the dinner-hour is always slack, and even when we came to a place where a section of trench had been bashed open by trench-sweepers, and it was recommended to duck and hurry, nothing much happened. The uncanny thing was the absence of movement in the Boche trenches. Sometimes one imagined that one smelt strange tobacco, or heard a rifle-bolt working after a shot. Otherwise they were as still as pig at noonday.
We held on through the maze, past trench-sweepers of a handy light pattern, with their screw-tailed charge all ready; and a grave or so; and when I came on men who merely stood within easy reach of their rifles, I knew I was in the second line. When they lay frankly at ease in their dug-outs, I knew it was the third. A shot-gun would have sprinkled all three.
"No flat plains," said Alan. "No hunting for gun positions —the hills are full of them—and the trenches close together and commanding each other. You see what a beautiful country it is."