The main gallery opened to the surface at the front and back, and was about forty-five paces long. It was driven through hard ground, and was well arched so that it required no timber. On one side there was a branch to the pantries and the galley, and on the other side the dining-room and the bedrooms, which were really one big chamber with solid pillars of earth left at intervals, forming a group of rooms each with a dome roof and canvas partitions. A borehole had been put through to the surface at the centre of every room for ventilation and light, a device of reflectors enabling one to bring the sunlight in at all hours of the day.
Once, as we sat and smoked, a subdued chattering came from the adjoining room. I looked up and saw the top of a periscope over the partition. Instantly it disappeared with a noise like the scattering of furniture. Then a voice: “Oh, daddy, do you know what?”
“What’s happened, Kit?” replied the father.
“Two of your biscuit photo-frames are smashed.”
“Oh, never mind, old girl,” said Fred; “it’s time they began to break up after fifteen years. Go to sleep, both of you.”
As I lay awake next morning I overheard some homely details. How the baldy steer had hopped over O’Dwyer’s parapet into his lucerne patch; and Jimmy ought to have widened the trench last week when he was told to; and the milking sap hadn’t been cleaned out the previous day because Georgie had forgotten he was pioneer; and Jerry O’Dwyer had shot two crows from the new sniper’s pozzy[2] down at the creek—and so on.
When we sat down to breakfast Mrs. Prince was primed with news. “I told Fred,” she said, “I didn’t believe we’d taken Lake Achi Baba; the latest cable says it’s still occupied by the German submarines.” Fred nodded as if he didn’t care much.
“Achi Baba used to be a hill once, wasn’t it, daddy?” chipped in one of the youngsters.
“Yes, it used to be one time,” replied his father, looking into the blue puffs that drifted away from his pipe and out past the waterproof sheet of the dug-out door. In those blue mists of the past what he saw was the bald pate of the great hill, with the howitzers tearing earth out of the crest of it by the hundredweight, while the Turkish miners ever heaped the outside of it with the spoil from their tunnels. “Yes, it was a hill once.”
Thus Freddy and his wife and family live their life as happily as if there were no war.