I shall try to give some idea of what this fighting looks like. Late one afternoon, coming out of a trench into a green meadow, I suddenly found myself backed against a mud-bank made of the dirt taken from the trenches. We were just at the crest of a hill. In khaki clothes I was of the same color as the mud-bank; so an officer told me I was in a fairly safe position.
Modern war becomes a somewhat flat affair after the first impressions have been dulled.
We blotted ourselves against our mud-bank, carefully adjusted our glasses, turned them toward the valley before us, whence came the sound of exploding shells, and watched a village dying in the sunset. It was only about a thousand yards away—I didn't even ask whether it was in French or German possession. A loud explosion, a roll of dense black smoke, penetrated at once by the long, horizontal rays of sun, revealing tumbling roofs and crumbling walls. A few seconds' intermission; then another explosion; a public school in the main street sagged suddenly in the center. With no pause came a succession of explosions, and the building was prone upon the ground—a jagged pile of broken stones.
We turned our glasses on the other end of the village. A column of black smoke was rising where the church had caught fire. We watched it awhile in silence. Ruins were getting very common. I swept the glasses away from the hamlet altogether and pointed out over the distant fields to the left.
"Where are the German trenches?" I asked the Major.
"I'll show you—just a moment!" he answered, and at the same time signaling to a soldier squatting in the entrance to a trench near by, he ordered the man to convey a message to the telephone station, which connected with a "seventy-five" battery at our rear. I was on the point of telling the officer not to bother about it. The words were on my lips; then I thought: "Oh, never mind! I might as well know where the trenches are, now that I have asked."
The soldier disappeared. "Watch!" said the officer. We peered intently across the fields to the left. In less than a minute there were two sharp explosions behind us, two puffs of smoke out on the horizon before us, about a mile away.
"That's where they are!" the officer said. "Both shells went right into them!"
Away to the right of the village, now reduced to ruins, was another larger village; we squared around on our mud bank to look at that. This town was more important; it was Neuville-Saint-Vaast, which was occupied by both French and Germans, the former slowly retaking it, house by house. We were about half a mile away. We could see little; for strangely, in this business of house-to-house occupation, most of the fighting is in the cellars. But I could well imagine what was going on, for I had already walked through the ruins of Vermelles, another town now entirely in French possession, but taken in the same fashion after two months' dogged inch-by-inch advances.
So, when, looking at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, I suddenly heard a tremendous explosion and saw a great mass of masonry and débris of all descriptions flying high in the air, I knew just what had happened. The French—for it is always the French who do it—had burrowed, sapped and dug themselves laboriously, patiently, slowly, by torturous, narrow underground routes from one row of houses under the foundations of the next row of houses. There they had planted mines. The explosion I had just witnessed was of a mine. Much of the débris I saw flying through space had been German soldiers a few seconds before.