"Belgian carabineers," he said. "They did some of the most heroic work of the war last summer and autumn. They were decorated by the King. Now they are worn out and they mend roads!"

For—and this I had to learn—a man may not fight always, even although he escapes actual injury. It is the greatest problem of commanding generals that they must be always moving forward fresh troops. The human element counts for much in any army. Nerves go after a time. The constant noise of the guns has sent men mad.

More than ever, in this new warfare, is the problem serious. For days the men suffer not only the enemy's guns but the roar of their own batteries from behind them. They cannot always tell which side they hear. Their tortured ears ache with listening. And when they charge and capture an outpost it is not always certain that they will escape their own guns. In one tragic instance that I know of this happened.

The route was by way of Poperinghe, with its narrow, crowded streets, its fresh troops just arrived and waiting patiently, heavy packs beside them, for orders. In Poperinghe are found all the troops of the Allies: British, Belgian, French, Hindus, Cingalese, Algerians, Moroccans. Its streets are a series of colourful pictures, of quaint uniforms, of a babel of tongues, of that minor confusion that is order on a great scale. The inevitable guns rumbled along with six horses and three drivers: a lead driver, a centre driver and wheel driver. Unlike the British guns, there are generally no gunners with the guns, but only an officer or two. The gunners go ahead on foot. Lines of hussars rode by, making their way slowly round a train of British Red-Cross ambulances.

At Elverdingue I was to see the men in their billets. Elverdingue was another Poperinghe—the same crowds of soldiers, the same confusion, only perhaps more emphasised, for Elverdingue is very near the front, between Poperinghe and Ypres and a little to the north, where the line that curves out about Ypres bends back again.

More guns, more hussars. It was difficult to walk across the narrow streets. We watched our chance and broke through at last, going into a house at random. As each house had soldiers billeted in it, it was certain we would find some, and I was to see not selected quarters but billets chosen at random. Through a narrow, whitewashed centre hall, with men in the rooms on either side, and through a muddy kitchen, where the usual family was huddled round a stove, we went into a tiny, brick-paved yard. Here was a shed, a roof only, which still held what remained of the winter's supply of coal.

Two soldiers were cooking there. Their tiny fire of sticks was built against a brick wall, and on it was a large can of stewing meat. One of the cooks—they were company cooks—was watching the kettle and paring potatoes in a basket. The other was reading a letter aloud. As the officers entered the men rose and saluted, their bright eyes taking in this curious party, which included, of all things, a woman!

"When did you get in from the trenches?" one of the officers asked.

"At two o'clock this morning, Monsieur le Capitaine."

"And you have not slept?"

"But no. The men must eat. We have cooked ever since we returned."

Further questioning elicited the facts that he would sleep when his company was fed, that he was twenty-two years old, and that—this not by questions but by investigation—he was sheltered against the cold by a large knitted muffler, an overcoat, a coat, a green sweater, a flannel shirt and an undershirt. Under his blue trousers he wore also the red ones of an old uniform, the red showing through numerous rents and holes.

"You have a letter, comrade!" said the Lieutenant to the other man.

"From my family," was the somewhat sheepish reply.

Round the doorway other soldiers had gathered to see what was occurring. They came, yawning with sleep, from the straw they had been sleeping on, or drifted in from the streets, where they had been smoking in the sun. They were true republicans, those French soldiers. They saluted the officers without subservience, but as man to man. And through a break in the crowd a new arrival was shoved forward. He came, smiling uneasily.

"He has the new uniform," I was informed, and he must turn round to show me how he looked in it.

We went across the street and through an alleyway to an open place where stood an old coach house. Here were more men, newly in from the front. The coach house was a ruin, far from weather-proof and floored with wet and muddy straw. One could hardly believe that that straw had been dry and fresh when the troops came in at dawn. It was hideous now, from the filth of the trenches. The men were awake, and being advised of our coming by an anxious and loud-voiced member of the company who ran ahead, they were on their feet, while others, who had been sleeping in the loft, were on their way down the ladder.

"They have been in a very bad place all night," said the Captain. "They are glad to be here, they say."

"You mean that they have been in a dangerous place?"

The men were laughing among themselves and pushing forward one of their number. Urged by their rapid French, he held out his cap to me. It had been badly torn by a German bullet. Encouraged by his example, another held out his cap. The crown had been torn almost out of it.

"You see," said Captain Boisseau, "it was not a comfortable night. But they are here, and they are content."

I could understand it, of course, but "here" seemed so pitifully poor a place—a wet and cold and dirty coach house, open to all the winds that blew; before it a courtyard stabling army horses that stood to the fetlocks in mud. For food they had what the boy of twenty-two or other cooks like him were preparing over tiny fires built against brick walls. But they were alive, and there were letters from home, and before very long they expected to drive the Germans back in one of those glorious charges so dear to the French heart. They were here, and they were content.

More sheds, more small fires, more paring of potatoes and onions and simmering of stews. The meal of the day was in preparation and its odours were savoury. In one shed I photographed the cook, paring potatoes with a knife that looked as though it belonged on the end of a bayonet. And here I was lined up by the fire and the cook—and the knife—and my picture taken. It has not yet reached me. Perhaps it went by way of England, and was deleted by the censor as showing munitions of war!

From Elverdingue the road led north and west, following the curves of the trenches. We went through Woesten, where on the day before a dramatic incident had taken place. Although the town was close to the battlefield and its church in plain view from the German lines, it had escaped bombardment. But one Sunday morning a shot was fired. The shell went through the roof of the church just above the altar, fell and exploded, killing the priest as he knelt. The hole in the roof of the building bore mute evidence to this tragedy. It was a small hole, for the shell exploded inside the building. When I saw it a half dozen planks had been nailed over it to keep out the rain.

There were trees outside Woesten, more trees than I had been accustomed to nearer the sea. Here and there a troop of cavalry horses was corralled in a grove; shaggy horses, not so large as the English ones. They were confined by the simple expedient of stretching a rope from tree to tree in a large circle.

"French horses," I said, "always look to me so small and light compared with English horses."

Then a horse moved about, and on its shaggy flank showed plainly the mark of a Western branding iron! They were American cow ponies from the plains.

"There are more than a hundred thousand American horses here," observed the Lieutenant. "They are very good horses."

Later on I stopped to stroke the soft nose of a black horse as it stood trembling near a battery of heavy guns that was firing steadily. It was American too. On its flank there was a Western brand. I gave it an additional caress, and talked a little American into one of its nervous, silky ears. We were both far from home, a trifle bewildered, a bit uneasy and frightened.

And now it was the battlefield—the flat, muddy plain of Ypres. On the right bodies of men, sheltered by intervening groves and hedges, moved about. Dispatch riders on motor cycles flew along the roads, and over the roof of a deserted farmhouse an observation balloon swung in the wind. Beyond the hedges and the grove lay the trenches, and beyond them again German batteries were growling. Their shells, however, were not bursting anywhere near us.

The balloon was descending. I asked permission to go up in it, but when I saw it near at hand I withdrew the request. It had no basket, like the ones I had seen before, but instead the observers, two of them, sat astride a horizontal bar.

The English balloons have a basket beneath, I am told. One English airship man told me that to be sent up in a stationary balloon was the greatest penalty a man could be asked to pay. The balloon jerks at the end of its rope like a runaway calf, and "the resulting nausea makes sea-sickness seem like a trip to the Crystal Palace."

So I did not go up in that observation balloon on the field of Ypres. We got out of the car, and trudged after the balloon as it was carried to its new position by many soldiers. We stood by as it rose again above the tree tops, the rope and the telephone wire hanging beneath it. But what the observers saw that afternoon from their horizontal bar I do not yet know—trenches, of course. But trenches are interesting in this war only when their occupants have left them and started forward. Batteries and ammunition trains, probably, the latter crawling along the enemy's roads. But both of these can be better and more easily located by aeroplanes.

The usefulness of the captive balloon in this war is doubtful. It serves, at the best, to take the place of an elevation of land in this flat country, is a large and tempting target, and can serve only on very clear days, when there is no ground mist—a difficult thing to achieve in Flanders.

We were getting closer to the front all the time. As the automobile jolted on, drawing out for transports, for ambulances and ammunition wagons, the two French officers spoke of the heroism of their men. They told me, one after the other, of brave deeds that had come under their own observation.

"The French common soldier is exceedingly brave—quite reckless," one of them said. "Take, for instance, the case, a day or so ago, of Philibert Musillat, of the 168th Infantry. We had captured a communication trench from the Germans and he was at the end of it, alone. There was a renewal of the German attack, and they came at him along the trench. He refused to retreat. His comrades behind handed him loaded rifles, and he killed every German that appeared until they lay in a heap. The Germans threw bombs at him, but he would not move. He stood there for more than twelve hours!"

There were many such stories, such as that of the boys of the senior class of the military school of St. Cyr, who took, the day of the beginning of the war, an oath to put on gala dress, white gloves and a red, white and blue plume, when they had the honour to receive the first order to charge.

They did it, too. Theatrical? Isn't it just splendidly boyish? They did it, you see. The first of them to die, a young sub-lieutenant, was found afterward, his red, white and blue plume trampled in the mud, his brave white gloves stained with his own hot young blood. Another of these St. Cyr boys, shot in the face hideously and unable to speak, stood still under fire and wrote his orders to his men. It was his first day under fire.

A boy fell injured between the barbed wire in front of his trench and the enemy, in that No Man's Land of so many tragedies. His comrades, afraid of hitting him, stopped firing.

"Go on!" he called to them. "No matter about me. Shoot at them!"

So they fired, and he writhed for a moment.

"I got one of yours that time!" he said.

The Germans retired, but the boy still lay on the ground, beyond reach. He ceased moving, and they thought he was dead. One may believe that they hoped he was dead. It was more merciful than the slow dying of No Man's Land. But after a time he raised his head.

"Look out," he called. "They are coming again. They are almost up to me!"

That is all of that story.



CHAPTER XVIII

FRENCH GUNS IN ACTION

The car stopped. We were at the wireless and telephone headquarters for the French Army of the North. It was a low brick building, and outside, just off the roadway, was a high van full of telephone instruments. That it was moved from one place to another was shown when, later in the day, returning by that route, we found the van had disappeared.

It was two o'clock. The German wireless from Berlin had just come in. At three the receiving station would hear from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It was curious to stand there and watch the operator, receivers on his ears, picking up the German message. It was curious to think that, just a little way over there, across a field or two, the German operator was doing the same thing, and that in an hour he would be receiving the French message.

All the batteries of the army corps are—or were—controlled from that little station. The colonel in charge came out to greet us, and to him Captain Boisseau gave General Foch's request to show me batteries in action.

The colonel was very willing. He would go with us himself. I conquered a strong desire to stand with the telephone building between me and the German lines, now so near, and looked about. A French aeroplane was overhead, but there was little bustle and activity along the road. It is a curious fact in this war that the nearer one is to the front the quieter things become. Three or four miles behind there is bustle and movement. A mile behind, and only an occasional dispatch rider, a few men mending roads, an officer's car, a few horses tethered in a wood, a broken gun carriage, a horse being shod behind a wall, a soldier on a lookout platform in a tree, thickets and hedges that on occasion spout fire and death—that is the country round Ypres and just behind the line, in daylight.

We were between Ypres and the Allied line, in that arc which the Germans are, as I write, trying so hard to break through. The papers say that they are shelling Ypres and that it is burning. They were shelling it that day also. But now, as then, I cannot believe it is burning. There was nothing left to burn.

While arrangements were being made to visit the batteries, Lieutenant Puaux explained to me a method they had established at that point for measuring the altitude of hostile aeroplanes for the guns.

"At some anti-aircfaft batteries," he explained, "they have the telemeter for that purpose. But here there is none. So they use the system of visee laterale, or side sight, literally."

He explained it all carefully to me. I understood it at the time, I think.

I remember saying it was perfectly clear, and a child could do it, and a number of other things. But the system of visee laterale has gone into that part of my mind which contains the Latin irregular verbs, harmonies, the catechism and answers to riddles.

There is a curious feeling that comes with the firing of a large battery at an unseen enemy. One moment the air is still; there is a peaceful plain round. The sun shines, and heavy cart horses, drawing a wagon filled with stones for repairing a road, are moving forward steadily, their heads down, their feet sinking deep in the mud. The next moment hell breaks loose. The great guns stand with smoking jaws. The message of death has gone forth. Over beyond the field and that narrow line of trees, what has happened? A great noise, the furious recoiling of the guns, an upcurling of smoke—that is the firing of a battery. But over there, perhaps, one man, or twenty, or fifty men, lying still.

So I required assurance that this battery was not being fired for me. I had no morbid curiosity as to batteries. One of the officers assured me that I need have no concern. Though they were firing earlier than had been intended, a German battery had been located and it was their instructions to disable it.

The battery had been well concealed.

"No German aeroplane has as yet discovered it," explained the officer in charge.

To tell the truth, I had not yet discovered it myself. We had alighted from the machine in a sea of mud. There was mud everywhere.

A farmhouse to the left stood inaccessible in it. Down the road a few feet a tree with an observation platform rose out of it. A few chickens waded about in it. A crowd of soldiers stood at a respectful distance and watched us. But I saw no guns.

One of the officers stooped and picked up the cast shoe of a battery horse, and shaking the mud off, presented it to me.

"To bring you luck," he said, "and perhaps luck to the battery!"

We left the road, and turning to the right made a floundering progress across a field to a hedge. Only when we were almost there did I realise that the hedge was the battery.

"We built it," said the officer in charge. "We brought the trees and saplings and constructed it. Madame did not suspect?"

Madame had not suspected. There were other hedges in the neighbourhood, and the artificial one had been well contrived. Halfway through the field the party paused by a curious elevation, flat, perhaps twenty feet across and circular.

"The cyclone cellar!" some one said. "We will come here during the return fire."

But one look down the crude steps decided me to brave the return fire and die in the open. The cave below the flat roof, turf-covered against the keen eyes of aeroplanes, was full of water. The officers watched my expression and smiled.

And now we had reached the battery, and eager gunners were tearing away the trees and shrubbery that covered them. In an incredible space of time the great grey guns, sinister, potential of death, lay open to the bright sky. The crews gathered round, each man to his place. The shell was pushed home, the gunners held the lanyards.

"Open your mouth wide," said the officer in charge, and gave the signal.

The great steel throats were torn open. The monsters recoiled, as if aghast at what they had done. Their white smoke curled from the muzzles. The dull horses in the road lifted their heads.

And over there, beyond the line of poplar trees, what?

One by one they fired the great guns. Then all together, several rounds. The air was torn with noise. Other batteries, far and near, took up the echo. The lassitude of the deadlock was broken.

And then overhead the bursting shell of a German gun. The return fire had commenced!

I had been under fire before. The sound of a bursting shell was not a new one. But there had always before been a strong element of chance in my favour. When the Germans were shelling a town, who was I that a shell should pick me out to fall on or to explode near? But this was different. They were firing at a battery, and I was beside that battery. It was all very well for the officer in charge to have said they had never located his battery. I did not believe him. I still doubt him. For another shell came.

The soldiers from the farmhouse had gathered behind us in the field. I turned and looked at them. They were smiling. So I summoned a shaky smile myself and refused the hospitality of the cellar full of water.

One of the troopers stepped out from the others.

"We have just completed a small bridge," he said—"a bridge over the canal. Will madame do us the honour of walking across it? It will thus be inaugurated by the only lady at the front."

Madame would. Madame did. But without any real enthusiasm. The men cheered, and another German shell came, and everything was merry as a marriage bell.

They invited me to climb the ladder to the lookout in the tree and look at the enemy's trenches. But under the circumstances I declined. I felt that it was time to move on and get hence. The honour of being the only woman who had got to the front at Ypres began to weigh heavy on me. I mentioned the passing of time and the condition of the roads.

So at last I got into the car. The officers of the battery bowed, and the men, some fifty of them, gave me three rousing cheers. I think of them now, and there is a lump in my throat. They were so interested, so smiling and cheery, that bright late February afternoon, standing in the mud of the battlefield of Ypres, with German shells bursting overhead. Half of them, even then, had been killed or wounded. Each day took its toll of some of them, one way or another.

How many of them are left to-day? The smiling officer, so debonair, so proud of his hidden battery, where is he? The tiny bridge, has it run red this last week? The watchman in the tree, what did he see, that terrible day when the Germans got across the canal and charged over the flat lands?

The Germans claim to have captured guns at or near this place. One thing I am sure of: This battery or another, it was not taken while there were men belonging to it to defend it. The bridge would run red and the water under the bridge, the muddy field be strewn with bodies, before those cheery, cool-eyed and indomitable French gunners would lose their guns.

The car moved away, fifty feet, a hundred feet, and turned out to avoid an ammunition wagon, disabled in the road. It was fatal. We slid off into the mire and settled down. I looked back at the battery. A fresh shell was bursting high in the air.

We sat there, interminable hours that were really minutes, while an orderly and the chauffeur dug us out with spades. We conversed of other things. But it was a period of uneasiness on my part. And, as if to point the lesson and adorn the tale, away to the left, rising above the plain, was the church roof with the hole in it—mute evidence that even the mantle of righteousness is no protection against a shell.

Our course was now along a road just behind the trenches and paralleling them, to an anti-aircraft station.

I have seen a number of anti-aircraft stations at the front: English ones near the coast and again south of Ypres; guns mounted, as was this French battery, on the plain of a battlefield; isolated cannon in towers and on the tops of buildings and water tanks. I have seen them in action, firing at hostile planes. I have never yet seen them do any damage, but they serve a useful purpose in keeping the scouting machines high in the air, thus rendering difficult the work of the enemy's observer. The real weapon against the hostile aeroplane is another machine. Several times I have seen German Taubes driven off by French aviators, and winging a swift flight back to their lines. Not, one may be sure, through any lack of courage on the part of German aviators. They are fearless and extremely skilful. But because they have evidently been instructed to conserve their machines.

I had considerable curiosity as to the anti-aircraft batteries. How was it possible to manipulate a large field gun, with a target moving at a varying height, and at a speed velocity of, say, sixty miles an hour?

The answer was waiting on the field just north of Ypres.

A brick building by the road was evidently a storehouse for provisions for the trenches. Unloaded in front of it were sacks of bread, meal and provisions. And standing there in the sunshine was the commander of the field battery, Captain Mignot. A tall and bearded man, essentially grave, he listened while Lieutenant Puaux explained the request from General Foch that I see his battery. He turned and scanned the sky.

"We regret," he said seriously, "that at the moment there is no aeroplane in sight. We will, however, show Madame everything."

He led the way round the corner of the building to where a path, neatly banked, went out through the mud to the battery.

"Keep to the path," said a tall sign. But there was no temptation to do otherwise. There must have been fifty acres to that field, unbroken by hedge or tree. As we walked out, Captain Mignot paused and pointed his finger up and somewhat to the right.

"German shrapnel!" he said. True enough, little spherical clouds told where it had burst harmlessly.

As cannonading had been going on steadily all the afternoon, no one paid any particular attention. We walked on in the general direction of the trenches.

The gunners were playing prisoner's base just beyond the guns. When they saw us coming the game ceased, and they hurried to their stations. Boys they were, most of them. The youth of the French troops had not impressed me so forcibly as had the boyishness of the English and the Belgians. They are not so young, on an average, I believe. But also the deception of maturity is caused by a general indifference to shaving while in the field.

But Captain Mignot evidently had his own ideas of military smartness, and these lads were all clean-shaven. They trooped in from their game, under that little cloud of shrapnel smoke that still hung in the sky, for all the world a crowd of overheated and self-conscious schoolboys receiving an unexpected visit from the master of the school.

The path ended at the battery. In the centre of the guns was a raised platform of wood, and a small shelter house for the observer or officer on duty. There were five guns in pits round this focal point and forming a circle. And on the platform in the centre was a curious instrument on a tripod.

"The telemeter," explained Captain Mignot; "for obtaining the altitude of the enemy's aeroplane."

Once again we all scanned the sky anxiously, but uselessly.

"I don't care to have any one hurt," I said; "but if a plane is coming I wish it would come now. Or a Zeppelin."

The captain's serious face lighted in a smile.

"A Zeppelin!" he said. "We would with pleasure wait all the night for a Zeppelin!"

He glanced round at the guns. Every gunner was in his place. We were to have a drill.

"We will suppose," he said, "that a German aeroplane is approaching. To fire correctly we must first know its altitude. So we discover that with this." He placed his hand on the telemeter. "There are, you observe, two apertures, one for each eye. In one the aeroplane is seen right side up. In the other the image is inverted, upside down. Now! By this screw the images are made to approach, until one is superimposed exactly over the other. Immediately on the lighted dial beneath is shown the altitude, in metres."

I put my eyes to the openings, and tried to imagine an aeroplane overhead, manoeuvring to drop a bomb or a dart on me while I calculated its altitude. I could not do it.

Next I was shown the guns. They were the famous seventy-five-millimetre guns of France, transformed into aircraft guns by the simple expedient of installing them in a pit with sloping sides, so that their noses pointed up and out. To swing them round, so that they pointed readily toward any portion of the sky, a circular framework of planks formed a round rim to the pit, and on this runway, heavily greased, the muzzles were swung about.

The gun drill began. It was executed promptly, skilfully. There was no bungling, not a wrong motion or an unnecessary one, as they went through the movements of loading, sighting and firing the guns. It was easy to see why French artillery has won its renown. The training of the French artilleryman is twice as severe as that of the infantryman. Each man, in addition to knowing his own work on the gun, must be able to do the work of all the eleven others. Casualties must occur, and in spite of them the work of the gun must go on.

Casualties had occurred at that station. More than half the original battery was gone. The little shelter house was splintered in a hundred places. There were shell holes throughout the field, and the breech of one gun had recently been shattered and was undergoing repair.

The drill was over and the gunners stood at attention. I asked permission to photograph the battery, and it was cheerfully given. One after the other I took the guns, until I had taken four. The gunners waited smilingly expectant. For the last gun I found I had no film, but I could not let it go at that. So I pointed the empty camera at it and snapped the shutter. It would never do to show discrimination.

Somewhere in London are all those pictures. They have never been sent to me. No doubt a watchful English government pounced on them in the mail, and, in connection with my name, based on them most unjust suspicions. They were very interesting. There was Captain Mignot, and the two imposing officers from General Foch's staff; there were smiling young French gunners; there was the telemeter, which cost, they told me, ten thousand francs, and surely deserved to have its picture taken, and there was one, not too steady, of a patch of sunny sky and a balloon-shaped white cloud, where another German shrapnel had burst overhead.

The drill was over. We went back along the path toward the road. Behind the storehouse the evening meal was preparing in a shed. The battery was to have a new ration that night for a change, bacon and codfish. Potatoes were being pared into a great kettle and there was a bowl of eggs on a stand. It appeared to me, accustomed to the meagre ration of the Belgians, that the French were dining well that night on the plains of Ypres.

In a stable near at hand a horse whinnied. I patted him as I passed, and he put his head against my shoulder.

"He recognises you!" said Captain Boisseau. "He too is American."

It was late afternoon by that time. The plan to reach the advanced trenches was frustrated by an increasing fusillade from the front. There were barbed-wire entanglements everywhere, and every field was honeycombed with trenches. One looked across the plain and saw nothing. Then suddenly as we advanced great gashes cut across the fields, and in these gashes, although not a head was seen, were men. The firing was continuous. And now, going down a road, with a line of poplar trees at the foot and the setting sun behind us throwing out faint shadows far ahead, we saw the flash of water. It was very near. It was the flooded river and the canal. Beyond, eight hundred yards or less from where we stood, were the Germans. To one side the inundation made a sort of bay.

It was along this part of the field that the Allies expected the German Army to make its advance when the spring movement commenced. And as nearly as can be learned from the cabled accounts that is where the attack was made.

A captain from General d'Urbal's staff met us at the trenches, and pointed out the strategical value of a certain place, the certainty of a German advance, and the preparations that were made to meet it.

It was odd to stand there in the growing dusk, looking across to where was the invading army, only a little over two thousand feet away. It was rather horrible to see that beautiful landscape, the untravelled road ending in the line of poplars, so very close, where were the French outposts, and the shining water just beyond, and talk so calmly of the death that was waiting for the first Germans who crossed the canal.



CHAPTER XIX

"I NIBBLE THEM"

I went into the trenches. The captain was very proud of them.

"They represent the latest fashion in trenches!" he explained, smiling faintly.

It seemed to me that I could easily have improved on that latest fashion. The bottom was full of mud and water. Standing in the trench, I could see over the side by making an effort. The walls were wattled—that is, covered with an interlacing of fagots which made the sides dry.

But it was not for that reason only that these trenches were called the latest fashion. They were divided, every fifteen feet or so, by a bulwark of earth about two feet thick, round which extended a communication trench.

"The object of dividing these trenches in this manner is to limit the havoc of shells that drop into them," the captain explained. "Without the earth bulwark a shell can kill every man in the trench. In this way it can kill only eight. Now stand at this end of the trench. What do you see?"

What I saw was a barbed-wire entanglement, leading into a cul-de-sac.

"A rabbit trap!" he said. "They will come over the field there, and because they cannot cross the entanglement they will follow it. It is built like a great letter V, and this is the point."

The sun had gone down to a fiery death in the west. The guns were firing intermittently. Now and then from the poplar trees came the sharp ping of a rifle. The evening breeze had sprung up, ruffling the surface of the water, and bringing afresh that ever-present and hideous odour of the battlefield. Behind us the trenches showed signs of activity as the darkness fell.

Suddenly the rabbit trap and the trench grew unspeakably loathsome and hideous to me. What a mockery, this business of killing men! No matter that beyond the canal there lurked the menace of a foe that had himself shown unspeakable barbarity and resource in plotting death. No matter if the very odour that stank in my nostrils called loud for vengeance. I thought of German prisoners I had seen, German wounded responding so readily to kindness and a smile. I saw them driven across that open space, at the behest of frantic officers who were obeying a guiding ambition from behind. I saw them herded like cattle, young men and boys and the fathers of families, in that cruel rabbit trap and shot by men who, in their turn, were protecting their country and their homes.

I have in my employ a German gardener. He has been a member of the household for years. He has raised, or helped to raise, the children, has planted the trees, and helped them, like the children, through their early weakness. All day long he works in the garden among his flowers. He coaxes and pets them, feeds them, moves them about in the sun. When guests arrive, it is Wilhelm's genial smile that greets them. When the small calamities of a household occur, it is Wilhelm's philosophy that shows us how to meet them.

Wilhelm was a sergeant in the German Army for five years. Now he is an American citizen, owning his own home, rearing his children to a liberty his own childhood never knew.

But, save for the accident of emigration, Wilhelm would to-day be in the German Army. He is not young, but he is not old. His arms and shoulders are mighty. But for the accident of emigration, then, Wilhelm, working to-day in the sun among his Delphiniums and his iris, his climbing roses and flowering shrubs, would be wearing the helmet of the invader; for his vine-covered house he would have substituted a trench; for his garden pick a German rifle.

For Wilhelm was a faithful subject of Germany while he remained there. He is a Socialist. He does not believe in war. Live and help others to live is his motto. But at the behest of the Kaiser, Wilhelm too would have gone to his appointed place.

It was of Wilhelm then, and others of his kind, that I thought as I stood in the end of the new-fashion trench, looking at the rabbit trap. There must be many Wilhelms in the German Army, fathers, good citizens, kindly men who had no thought of a place in the sun except for the planting of a garden. Men who have followed the false gods of their country with the ardent blue eyes of supreme faith.

I asked to be taken home.

On the way to the machine we passed a mitrailleuse buried by the roadside. Its location brought an argument among the officers. Strategically it would be valuable for a time, but there was some question as to its position in view of a retirement by the French.

I could not follow the argument. I did not try to. I was cold and tired, and the red sunset had turned to deep purple and gold. The guns had ceased. Over all the countryside brooded the dreadful peace of sheer exhaustion and weariness. And in the air, high overhead, a German plane sailed slowly home.

* * * * *

Sentries halted us on the way back holding high lanterns that set the bayonets of their guns to gleaming. Faces pressed to the glass, they surveyed us stolidly, making sure that we were as our passes described us. Long lines of marching men turned out to let us pass. As darkness settled down, the location of the German line, as it encircled Ypres, was plainly shown by floating fusees. In every hamlet reserves were lining up for the trenches, dark masses of men, with here and there a face thrown into relief as a match was held to light a cigarette. Open doors showed warm, lamp-lit interiors and the glow of fires.

I sat back in the car and listened while the officers talked together. They were speaking of General Joffre, of his great ability, of his confidence in the outcome of the war, and of his method, during those winter months when, with such steady fighting, there had been so little apparent movement. One of the officers told me that General Joffre had put his winter tactics in three words:

"I nibble them."



CHAPTER XX

DUNKIRK: FROM MY JOURNAL

I wakened early this morning and went to church—a great empty place, very cold but with the red light of the sanctuary lamp burning before a shrine. There were perhaps a dozen people there when I went in. Before the Mater Dolorosa two women in black were praying with upturned eyes. At the foot of the Cross crouched the tragic figure of the Mother, with her dead Son in her arms. Before her were these other mothers, praying in the light of the thin burning candles. Far away, near the altar, seven women of the Society of the Holy Rosary were conducting a private service. They were market women, elderly, plain, raising to the altar faces full of faith and devotion, as they prayed for France and for their soldier-children.

Here and there was a soldier or a sailor on his knees on a low prie-dieu, his cap dangling loose in his hands. Unlike the women, the lips of these men seldom moved in prayer; they apparently gazed in wordless adoration at the shrine. Great and swelling thoughts were theirs, no doubt, kindled by that tiny red flame: thoughts too big for utterance or even for form. To go out and fight for France, to drive back the invaders, and, please God, to come back again—that was what their faces said.

Other people came in, mostly women, who gathered silently around the Mater Dolorosa. The great empty Cross; the woman and the dead Christ at the foot of it; the quiet, kneeling people before it; over all, as the services began, the silvery bell of the Mass; the bending backs of the priests before the altar; the sound of fresh, boyish voices singing in the choir—that is early morning service in the great Gothic church at Dunkirk.

Onto this drab and grey and grieving picture came the morning sunlight, through roof-high windows of red and yellow and of that warm violet that glows like a jewel. The candles paled in the growing light. A sailor near me gathered up his cap, which had fallen unheeded to the floor, and went softly out. The private service was over; the market women picked up their baskets and, bowing to the altar, followed the sailor. The great organ pleaded and cried out. I stole out. I was an intruder, gazing at the grief of a nation.

It was a transformed square that I walked through on my way back to the hotel. It was a market morning. All week long it had been crowded with motor ambulances, lorries, passing guns. Orderlies had held cavalry horses under the shadow of the statue in the centre. The fried-potato-seller's van had exuded an appetising odour of cooking, and had gathered round it crowds of marines in tam-o'-shanters with red woollen balls in the centre, Turcos in great bloomers, and the always-hungry French and Belgian troopers.

Now all was changed. The square had become a village filled with canvas houses, the striped red-and-white booths of the market people. War had given way to peace. For the clattering of accoutrements were substituted high pitched haggling, the cackling of geese in crates, the squawks of chickens tied by the leg. Little boys in pink-checked gingham aprons ran about or stood, feet apart, staring with frank curiosity at tall East Indians.

There were small and carefully cherished baskets of eggs and bundles of dead Belgian hares hung by the ears, but no other fresh meats. There was no fruit, no fancy bread. The vegetable sellers had only Brussels sprouts, turnips, beets and the small round potatoes of the country. For war has shorn the market of its gaiety. Food is scarce and high. The flower booths are offering country laces and finding no buyers. The fruit sellers have only shrivelled apples to sell.

Now, at a little after midday, the market is over. The canvas booths have been taken down, packed on small handcarts and trundled away; unsold merchandise is on its way back to the farm to wait for another week and another market. Already the market square has taken on its former martial appearance, and Dunkirk is at its midday meal of rabbit and Brussels sprouts.



CHAPTER XXI

TEA WITH THE AIR-FIGHTERS

Later: Roland Garros, the French aviator, has just driven off a German Taube. They both circled low over the town for some time. Then the German machine started east with Garros in pursuit. They have gone out of sight.

* * * * *

War is not all grey and grim and hideous. It has its lighter moments. The more terrible a situation the more keen is human nature to forget it for a time. Men play between shells in the trenches. London, suffering keenly, flocks to a comedy or a farce as a relief from strain. Wounded men, past their first agony, chaff each other in the hospitals. There are long hours behind the lines when people have tea and try to forget for a little while what is happening just ahead.

Some seven miles behind the trenches, in that vague "Somewhere in France," the British Army had established a naval air-station, where one of its dirigible airships was kept. In good weather the airship went out on reconnoissance. It was not a large airship, as such things go, and was formerly a training ship. Now it was housed in an extemporised hangar that was once a carwheel works, and made its ascent from a plain surrounded by barbed wire.

The airship men were extremely hospitable, and I made several visits to the station. On the day of which I am about to write I was taken for an exhaustive tour of the premises, beginning with the hangar and ending with tea. Not that it really ended with tea. Tea was rather a beginning, leading to all sorts of unexpected and surprising things.

The airship was out when I arrived, and a group of young officers was watching it, a dot on the horizon near the front. They gave me the glasses, and I saw it plainly—a long, yellowish, slowly moving object that turned as I looked and headed back for the station.

The group watched the sky carefully. A German aeroplane could wreck the airship easily. But although there were planes in sight none was of the familiar German lines.

It came on. Now one could see the car below. A little closer and three dots were the men in it. On the sandy plain which is the landing field were waiting the men whose work it is to warp the great balloon into its hangar. The wind had come up and made landing difficult. It was necessary to make two complete revolutions over the field before coming down. Then the blunt yellow nose dipped abruptly. The men below caught the ropes, the engine was cut off, and His Majesty's airship, in shape and colour not unlike a great pig, was safely at home again and being led to the stable.

"Do you want to know the bravest man in all the world?" one of the young officers said. "Because here he is. The funny thing about it is he doesn't know he is brave."

That is how I met Colonel M——, who is England's greatest airship man and who is in charge of the naval air station.

"If you had come a little sooner," he said, "you could have gone out with us."

I was grateful but unenthusiastic. I had seen the officers watching the sky for German planes. I had a keen idea that a German aviator overhead, armed with a Belgian block or a bomb or a dart, could have ripped that yellow envelope open from stem to stern, and robbed American literature of one of its shining lights. Besides, even in times of peace I am afraid to look out of a third-story window.

We made a tour of the station, which had been a great factory before the war began, beginning with the hangar in which the balloon was now safely housed.

Entrance to the station is by means of a bridge over a canal. The bridge is guarded by sentries and the password of the day is necessary to gain admission. East and west along the canal are canal boats that have been painted grey and have guns mounted on them. Side by side with these gunboats are the ordinary canal boats of the region, serving as homes for that part of the populace which remains, with women knitting on the decks or hanging out lines of washing overhead.

The endless traffic of a main highroad behind the lines passes the station day and night. Chauffeurs drop in to borrow petrol or to repair their cars; visiting officers from other stations come to watch the airship perform. For England has been slow to believe in the airships, pinning her aeronautical faith to heavier-than-air machines. She has considered the great expense for building and upkeep of each of these dirigible balloons—as much as that of fifty aeroplanes—the necessity of providing hangars for them, and their vulnerability to attack, as overbalancing the advantages of long range, silence as they drift with the wind with engines cut off, and ability to hover over a given spot and thus launch aerial bombs more carefully.

There is a friendly rivalry between the two branches of the air service, and so far in this war the credit apparently goes to the aeroplanes. However, until the war is over, and Germany definitely states what part her Zeppelins have had in both sea and land attacks, it will be impossible to make any fair comparison.

The officers at the naval air station had their headquarters in the administration building of the factory, a long brick building facing the road. Here in a long room with western windows they rested and relaxed, lined and talked between their adventurous excursions to the lines.

Day by day these men went out, some in the airship for a reconnoissance, others to man observation balloons. Day by day it was uncertain who would come back.

But they were very cheerful. Officers with an hour to spare came up from the gunboats in the canal to smoke a pipe by the fire. Once in so often a woman came, stopping halfway her frozen journey to a soup kitchen or a railroad station, where she looked after wounded soldiers, to sit in the long room and thaw out; visiting officers from other parts of the front dropped in for a meal, sure of a welcome and a warm fire. As compared with the trenches, or even with the gunboats on the canal, the station represented cheer, warmth; even, after the working daylight hours, society.

There were several buildings. Outside near the bridge was the wireless building, where an operator sat all the time with his receivers over his ears. Not far from the main group was the great hangar of the airship, and to that we went first. The hangar had been a machine shop with a travelling crane. It had been partially cleared but the crane still towered at one end. High above it, reached by a ladder, was a door.

The young captain of the airship pointed up to it.

"My apartments!" he said.

"Do you mean to say that you sleep here?" I asked. For the building was bitterly cold; one end had been knocked out to admit the airship, and the wall had been replaced by great curtains of sailcloth to keep out the wind.

"Of course," he replied. "I am always within call. There are sentries also to guard the ship. It would be very easy to put it out of commission."

The construction of the great balloon was explained to me carefully. It was made of layer after layer of gold-beater's skin and contained two ballonets—a small ship compared to the Zeppelins, and non-rigid in type.

Underneath the great cigar-shaped bag hangs an aluminum car which carries a crew of three men. The pilot sits in front at a wheel that resembles the driving wheel of an automobile. Just behind him is the observer, who also controls the wireless. The engineer is the third man.

The wireless puzzled me. "Do you mean that when you go out on scouting expeditions you can communicate with the station here?" I asked.

"It is quite possible. But when the airship goes out a wireless van accompanies it, following along the roads. Messages are picked up by the van and by a telephone connection sent to the various batteries."

It may be well to mention again the airship chart system by which the entire region is numbered and lettered in small squares. Black lines drawn across the detail map of the neighbourhood divide it into lettered squares, A, B, C, and so forth, and these lettered squares are again subdivided into four small squares, 1, 2, 3, 4. Thus the direction B 4, or N 2, is a very specific one in directing the fire of a battery.

"Did you accomplish much to-day?" I inquired.

"Not as much as usual. There is a ground haze," replied Colonel M——, who had been the observer in that day's flight. "Down here it is not so noticeable, but from above it obscures everything."

He explained the difficulties of the airship builder, the expense and tendency to "pinholes" of gold-beaters' skin, the curious fact that chemists had so far failed to discover a gasproof varnish.

"But of course," he said, "those things will come. The airship is the machine of the future. Its stability, its power to carry great weights, point to that. The difference between an airship and an aeroplane is the difference between a battleship and a submarine. Each has its own field of usefulness."

All round lay great cylinders of pure hydrogen, used for inflating the balloon. Smoking in the hangar was forbidden. The incessant wind rattled the great canvas curtains and whistled round the rusting crane. From the shop next door came the hammering of machines, for the French Government has put the mill to work again.

We left the hangar and walked past the machine shop. Halfway along one of its sides a tall lieutenant pointed to a small hole in the land, leading under the building.

"The French government has sent here," he said, "the men who are unfit for service in the army. Day by day, as German aeroplanes are seen overhead, the alarm is raised in the shop. The men are panic-stricken. If there are a dozen alarms they do the same thing. They rush out like frightened rabbits, throw themselves flat on the sand, and wriggle through that hole into a cave that they have dug underneath. It is hysterically funny; they all try to get in at the same time."

I had hoped to see the thing happen myself. But when, late that afternoon, a German aeroplane actually flew over the station, the works had closed down for the day and the men were gone. It was disappointing.

Between the machine shop and the administration building is a tall water tower. On top of this are two observers who watch the sky day and night. An anti-aircraft gun is mounted there and may be swung to command any portion of the sky. This precaution is necessary, for the station has been the object of frequent attacks. The airship itself has furnished a tempting mark to numerous German airmen. Its best speed is forty miles an hour, so they are able to circle about it and attack it from various directions. As it has only two ballonets, a single shot, properly placed, could do it great damage. The Zeppelin, with its eighteen great gasbags, can suffer almost any amount of attack and still remain in the air.

"Would you like to see the trenches?" said one of the officers, smiling.

"Trenches? Seven miles behind the line?"

"Trenches certainly. If the German drive breaks through it will come along this road."

"But I thought you lived in the administration building?"

"Some of us must hold the trenches," he said solemnly. "What are six or seven miles to the German Army? You should see the letters of sympathy we get from home!"

So he showed me the trenches. They were extremely nice trenches, dug out of the sand, it is true, but almost luxurious for all that, more like rooms than ditches, with board shelves and dishes on the shelves, egg cups and rows of shining glasses, silver spoons, neat little folded napkins, and, though the beds were on the floor, extremely tidy beds of mattresses and warm blankets. The floor was boarded over. There was a chair or two, and though I will not swear to pictures on the walls there were certainly periodicals and books. Outside the door was a sort of vestibule of boards which had been built to keep the wind out.

"You see!" said the young officer with twinkling eyes. "But of course this is war. One must put up with things!"

Nevertheless it was a real trench, egg cups and rows of shining glasses and electric light and all. It was there for a purpose. In front of it was a great barbed-wire barricade. Strategically it commanded the main road over which the German Army must pass to reach the point it has been striving for. Only seven miles away along that road it was straining even then for the onward spring movement. Any day now, and that luxurious trench may be the scene of grim and terrible fighting.

And, more than that, these men at the station were not waiting for danger to come to them. Day after day they were engaged in the most perilous business of the war.

At this station some of the queer anomalies of a volunteer army were to be found. So strongly ingrained in the heart of the British youth of good family is the love of country, that when he is unable to get his commission he goes in any capacity. I heard of a little chap, too small for the regular service, who has gone to the front as a cook! His uncle sits in the House of Lords. And here, at this naval air station, there were young noncommissioned officers who were Honourables, and who were trying their best to live it down. One such youth was in charge of the great van that is the repair shop for the airship. Others were in charge of the wireless station. One met them everywhere, clear-eyed young Englishmen ready and willing to do anything, no matter what, and proving every moment of their busy day the essential democracy of the English people.

As we went into the administration building that afternoon two things happened: The observers in the water tower reported a German aeroplane coming toward the station, and a young lieutenant, who had gone to the front in a borrowed machine, reported that he had broken the wind shield of the machine. There are plenty of German aeroplanes at that British airship station, but few wind shields. The aeroplane was ignored, but the wind shield was loudly and acrimoniously discussed.

The day was cold and had turned grey and lowering. It was pleasant after our tour of the station to go into the long living room and sit by the fire. But the fire smoked. One after another those dauntless British officers attacked it, charged with poker, almost with bayonet, and retired defeated. So they closed it up finally with a curious curved fire screen and let it alone. It was ten minutes after I began looking at the fire screen before I recognised it for what it was—the hood from an automobile!

Along one side of the wall was a piano. It had been brought back from a ruined house at the front. It was rather a poor piano and no one had any music, but some of the officers played a little by ear. The top of the piano was held up by a bandage! It was a piano of German make, and the nameplate had been wrenched off!

A long table filled the centre of the room. One end formed the press censorship bureau, for it was part of the province of the station to censor and stamp letters going out. The other end was the dining table. Over the fireplace on the mantel was a baby's shoe, a little brown shoe picked up on the street of a town that was being destroyed.

Beside it lay an odd little parachute of canvas with a weighted letter-carrier beneath. One of the officers saw me examining it and presented it to me, as it was worn and past service.

"Now and then," he explained, "it is impossible to use the wireless, for one reason or another. In that case a message can be dropped by means of the parachute."

I brought the message-carrier home with me. On its weighted canvas bag is written in ink: "Urgent! You are requested to forward this at once to the inclosed address. From His Majesty's airship ——."

The sight of the press-censor stamp reminded an English officer, who had lived in Belgium, of the way letters to and from interned Belgians have been taken over the frontier into Holland and there dispatched. Men who are willing to risk their lives for money collect these letters. At one time the price was as high as two hundred francs for each one. When enough have been gathered together to make the risk worth while the bearer starts on his journey. He must slip through the sentry lines disguised as a workman, or perhaps by crawling through the barbed wire at the barrier. For fear of capture some of these bearers, working their way through the line at night, have dragged their letters behind them, so that in case of capture they could drop the cord and be found without incriminating evidence on them. For taking letters into Belgium the process is naturally reversed. But letters are sent, not to names, but to numbers. The bearer has a list of numbers which correspond to certain addresses. Thus, even if he is taken and the letters are found on him, their intended recipients will not be implicated. I saw a letter which had been received in this way by a Belgian woman. It was addressed simply to Number Twenty-eight.

The fire was burning better behind its automobile hood. An orderly had brought in tea, white bread, butter, a pitcher of condensed cream, and an English teacake. We gathered round the tea table. War seemed a hundred miles away. Except for the blue uniforms and brass buttons of the officers who belonged to the naval air service, the orderly's khaki and the bayonet from a gun used casually at the other end of the table as a paperweight, it was an ordinary English tea.



CHAPTER XXII

THE WOMEN AT THE FRONT

It was commencing to rain outside. The rain beat on the windows and made even the reluctant fire seem cosy. Some one had had a box of candy sent from home. It was brought out and presented with a flourish.

"It is frightful, this life in the trenches!" said the young officer who passed it about.

Shortly afterward the party was increased. An orderly came in and announced that an Englishwoman, whose automobile had broken down, was standing on the bridge over the canal and asked to be admitted. She did not know the password and the sentry refused to let her pass by.

One of the officers went out and returned in a few moments with a small lady much wrapped in veils and extremely wet. She stood blinking in the doorway in the accustomed light. She was recognised at once as a well-known English novelist who is conducting a soup kitchen at a railroad station three miles behind the Belgian front.

"A car was to have picked me up," she said, "but I have walked and walked and it has not come. And I am so cold. Is that tea? And may I come to the fire?"

So they settled her comfortably, with her feet thrust out to the blaze, and gave her hot tea and plenty of bread and butter.

"It is like the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland," said one of the officers gaily. "When any fresh person drops in we just move up one place."

The novelist sipped her tea and told me about her soup kitchen.

"It is so very hard to get things to put into the soup," she said. "Of course I have no car, and now with the new law that no women are to be allowed in military cars I hardly know what to do."

"Will you tell me just what you do?" I asked. So she told me, and later I saw her soup kitchen.

"Men come in from the front," she explained, "injured and without food. Often they have had nothing to eat for a long time. We make soup of whatever meat we can find and any vegetables, and as the hospital trains come in we carry it out to the men. They are so very grateful for it."

That was to be an exceptional afternoon at the naval air-station. For hardly had the novelist been settled with her tea when two very attractive but strangely attired young women came into the room. They nodded to the officers, whom they knew, and went at once to the business which had brought them.

"Can you lend us a car?" they asked. "Ours has gone off the road into the mud, and it looks as though it would never move again."

That was the beginning of a very strange evening, almost an extraordinary evening. For while the novelist was on her way back to peace these young women were on their way home.

And home to them was one room of a shattered house directly on the firing line.

Much has been said about women at the front. As far as I know at that time there were only two women absolutely at the front. Nurses as a rule are kept miles behind the line. Here and there a soup kitchen, like that just spoken of, has held its courageous place three or four miles back along the lines of communication.

I have said that they were extraordinarily dressed. Rather they were most practically dressed. Under khaki-coloured leather coats these two young women wore khaki riding breeches with puttees and flannel shirts. They had worn nothing else for six months. They wore knitted caps on their heads, for the weather was extremely cold, and mittens.

The fire was blazing high and we urged them to take off their outer wraps. For a reason which we did not understand at the time they refused. They sat with their leather coats buttoned to the throat, and coloured violently when urged to remove them.

"But what are you doing here?" said one of the officers. "What brings you so far from P——"

They said they had had an errand, and went on drinking tea.

"What sort of an errand?" a young lieutenant demanded.

They exchanged glances.

"Shopping," they said, and took more tea.

"Shopping, for what?" He was smilingly impertinent.

They hesitated. Then: "For mutton," one of them replied. Both looked relieved. Evidently the mutton was an inspiration. "We have found some mutton." They turned to me. "It is a real festival. You have no idea how long it is since we've had anything of the sort."

"Mutton!" cried the novelist, with frankly greedy eyes. "It makes wonderful soup! Where can I get it?"

They told her, and she stood up, tied on her seven veils and departed, rejoicing, in a car that had come for her.

When she was gone Colonel M—— turned to one of the young women.

"Now," he said, "out with it. What brings you both so far from your thriving and prosperous little community?"

The irony of that was lost on me until later, when I discovered that the said community was a destroyed town with the advance line of trenches running through it, and that they lived in the only two whole rooms in the place.

"Out with it," said the colonel, and scowled ferociously.

Driven into a corner they were obliged to confess. For three hours that afternoon they had stood in a freezing wind on a desolate field, while King Albert of Belgium decorated for bravery various officers and—themselves. The jealously fastened coats were thrown open. Gleaming on the breast of each young woman was the star of the Order of Leopold!

"But why did you not tell us?" the officers demanded.

"Because," was the retort, "you have never approved of us; you have always wanted us sent back to England. The whole British Army has objected to our being where we are."

"Much good the objecting has done!" grumbled the officers. But in their hearts they were very proud.

Originally there had been three in this valiant little group of young aristocrats who have proved as true as their brothers to the traditions of their race. The third one was the daughter of an earl. She, too, had been decorated. But she had gone to a little town near by a day or two before.

"But what do you do?" I asked one of these young women. She was drawing on her mittens ready to start for their car.

"Sick and sorry work," she said briefly. "You know the sort of thing. I wish you would come out and have dinner with us. There is to be mutton."

I accepted promptly, but it was the situation and not the mutton that appealed to me. It was arranged that they should go ahead and set things in motion for the meal, and that I should follow later.

At the door one of them turned and smiled at me.

"They are shelling the village," she said. "You don't mind, do you?"

"Not at all," I replied. And I meant it. For I was no longer so gun-shy as I had been earlier in the winter. I had got over turning pale at the slamming of a door. I was as terrified, perhaps, but my pride had come to my aid.

It was the English officers who disapproved so thoroughly who told me about them when they had gone.

"Of course they have no business there," they said. "It's a frightful responsibility to place on the men at that part of the line. But there's no question about the value of what they are doing, and if they want to stay they deserve to be allowed to. They go right into the trenches, and they take care of the wounded until the ambulances can come up at night. Wait until you see their house and you will understand why they got those medals."

And when I had seen their house and spent an evening with them I understood very well indeed.

We gathered round the fire; conversation was desultory. Muddy and weary young officers, who had been at the front all day, came in and warmed themselves for a moment before going up to their cold rooms. The owner of the broken wind shield arrived and was placated. Continuous relays of tea were coming and going. Colonel ——, who had been in an observation balloon most of the day, spoke of balloon sickness.

"I have been in balloons of one sort and another for twenty years," he said. "I never overcome the nausea. Very few airmen do."

I spoke to him about a recent night attack by German aviators.

"It is remarkable work," he commented warmly, "hazardous in the extreme; and if anything goes wrong they cannot see where they are coming down. Even when they alight in their own lines, landing safely is difficult. They are apt to wreck their machines."

The mention of German aeroplanes reminded one of the officers of an experience he had had just behind the firing line.

"I had been to the front," he said, "and a mile or so behind the line a German aeroplane overtook the automobile. He flew low, with the evident intention of dropping a bomb on us. The chauffeur, becoming excited, stalled the engine. At that moment the aviator dropped the first bomb, killing a sow and a litter of young pigs beside the car and breaking all the glass. Cranking failed to start the car. It was necessary, while the machine manoeuvred to get overhead again, to lift the hood of the engine, examine a spark-plug and then crank the car. He dropped a second bomb which fell behind the car and made a hole in the road. Then at last the engine started, and it took us a very short time to get out of that neighbourhood."

The car he spoke of was the car in which I had come out to the station. I could testify that something had broken the glass!

One of the officers had just received what he said were official percentages of casualties in killed, wounded and missing among the Allies, to the first of February.

The Belgian percentage was 66 2-3, the English 33 1-3 and the French 7. I have no idea how accurate the figures were, or his authority for them. He spoke of them as official. From casualties to hospitals and nurses was but a step. I spoke warmly of the work the nurses near the front were doing. But one officer disagreed with me, although in the main his views were not held by the others.

"The nurses at the base hospitals should be changed every three months," he said. "They get the worst cases there, in incredible conditions. After a time it tells on them. I've seen it in a number of cases. They grow calloused to suffering. That's the time to bring up a new lot."

I think he is wrong. I have seen many hospitals, many nurses. If there is a change in the nurses after a time, it is that, like the soldiers in the field, they develop a philosophy which carries them through their terrible days. "What must be, must be," say the men in the trenches. "What must be, must be," say the nurses in the hospital. And both save themselves from madness.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE LITTLE "SICK AND SORRY" HOUSE

And now it was seven o'clock, and raining. Dinner was to be at eight. I had before me a drive of nine miles along those slippery roads. It was dark and foggy, with the ground mist of Flanders turning to a fog. The lamps of the car shining into it made us appear to be riding through a milky lake. Progress was necessarily slow.

One of the English officers accompanied me.

"I shall never forget the last time I dined out here," he said as we jolted along. "There is a Belgian battery just behind the house. All evening as we sat and talked I thought the battery was firing; the house shook under tremendous concussion. Every now and then Mrs. K—— or Miss C—— would get up and go out, coming back a few moments later and joining calmly in the conversation.

"Not until I started back did I know that we had been furiously bombarded, that the noise I had heard was shells breaking all about the place. A 'coal-box,' as they call them here, had fallen in the garden and dug a great hole!"

"And when the young ladies went out, were they watching the bombs burst?" I inquired.

"Not at all," he said. "They went out to go into the trenches to attend to the wounded. They do it all the time."

"And they said nothing about it!"

"They thought we knew. As for going into the trenches, that is what they are there to do."

My enthusiasm for mutton began to fade. I felt convinced that I should not remain calm if a shell fell into the garden. But again, as happened many times during those eventful weeks at the front, my pride refused to allow me to turn back. And not for anything in the world would I have admitted being afraid to dine where those two young women were willing to eat and sleep and have their being day and night for months.

"But of course," I said, "they are well protected, even if they are at the trenches. That is, the Germans never get actually into the town."

"Oh, don't they?" said the officer. "That town has been taken by the Germans five times and lost as many. A few nights ago they got over into the main street and there was terrific hand-to-hand fighting."

"Where do they go at such times?" I asked.

"I never thought about it. I suppose they get into the cellar. But if they do it is not at all because they are afraid."

We went on, until some five of the nine miles had been traversed.

I have said before that the activity at the front commences only with the falling of night. During the day the zone immediately back of the trenches is a dead country. But at night it wakens into activity. Soldiers leave the trenches and fresh soldiers take their places, ammunition and food are brought up, wires broken during the day by shells are replaced, ambulances come up and receive their frightful burdens.

Now we reached the zone of night activity. A travelling battery passed us, moving from one part of the line to another; the drivers, three to each gun, sat stolidly on their horses, their heads dropped against the rain. They appeared out of the mist beside us, stood in full relief for a moment in the glow of the lamps, and were swallowed up again.

At three miles from our destination, but only one mile from the German lines, it was necessary to put out the lamps. Our progress, which had been dangerous enough before, became extremely precarious. It was necessary to turn out for teams and lorries, for guns and endless lines of soldiers, and to turn out a foot too far meant slipping into the mud. Two miles and a half from the village we turned out too far.

There was a sickening side slip. The car turned over to the right at an acute angle and there remained. We were mired!

We got out. It was perfectly dark. Guns were still passing us, so that it was necessary to warn the drivers of our wrecked car. The road was full of shell holes, so that to step was to stumble. The German lines, although a mile away, seemed very near. Between the road and the enemy was not a tree or a shrub or a fence—only the line of the railway embankment which marked the Allies' trenches. To add to the dismalness of the situation the Germans began throwing the familiar magnesium lights overhead. The flares made the night alike beautiful and fearful. It was possible when one burst near to see the entire landscape spread out like a map—ditches full of water, sodden fields, shell holes in the roads which had become lakes, the long lines of poplars outlining the road ahead. At one time no less than twenty starlights hung in the air at one time. When they went out the inky night seemed blacker than ever. I stepped off the road and was almost knee-deep in mud at once.

The battery passed, urging its tired horses to such speed as was possible. After it came thousands of men, Belgian and French mostly, on their way out of the trenches.

We called for volunteers from the line to try to lift the car onto the road. But even with twenty men at the towing rope it refused to move. The men were obliged to give it up and run on to catch their companies.

Between the fusees the curious shuffling of feet and a deeper shadow were all that told of the passage of these troops. It was so dark that one could see no faces. But here and there one saw the light of a cigarette. The mere hardship of walking for miles along those roads, paved with round stones and covered with mud on which their feet slipped continually, must have been a great one, and agonizing for feet that had been frosted in the water of the trenches.

Afterward I inquired what these men carried. They loomed up out of the night like pack horses. I found that each soldier carried, in addition to his rifle and bayonet, a large knapsack, a canteen, a cartridge pouch, a brown haversack containing tobacco, soap, towel and food, a billy-can and a rolled blanket.

German batteries were firing intermittently as we stood there. The rain poured down. I had dressed to go out to tea and wore my one and only good hat. I did the only thing that seemed possible—I took off that hat and put it in the automobile and let the rain fall on my unprotected head. The hat had to see me through the campaign, and my hair would stand water.

At last an armoured car came along and pulled the automobile onto the road. But after a progress of only ten feet it lapsed again, and there remained.

The situation was now acute. It was impossible to go back, and to go ahead meant to advance on foot along roads crowded with silent soldiers—meant going forward, too, in a pouring rain and in high-heeled shoes. For that was another idiocy I had committed.

We started on, leaving the apologetic chauffeur by the car. A few feet and the road, curving to the right, began to near the German line. Every now and then it was necessary to call sharply to the troops, or struggling along through the rain they would have crowded us off knee-deep into the mud.

"Attention!" the officer would call sharply. And for a time we would have foot room. There were no more horses, no more guns—only men, men, men. Some of them had taken off their outer coats and put them shawl-fashion over their heads. But most of them walked stolidly on, already too wet and wretched to mind the rain.

The fog had lifted. It was possible to see that sinister red streak that follows the firing of a gun at night. The rain gave a peculiar hollowness to the concussion. The Belgian and French batteries were silent.

We seemed to have walked endless miles, and still there was no little town. We went over a bridge, and on its flat floor I stopped and rested my aching feet.

"Only a little farther now," said the British officer cheerfully.

"How much farther?"

"Not more than a mile,"

By way of cheering me he told me about the town we were approaching—how the road we were on was its main street, and that the advanced line of trenches crossed at the railroad near the foot of the street.

"And how far from that are the German trenches?" I asked nervously.

"Not very far," he said blithely. "Near enough to be interesting."

On and on. Here was a barn.

"Is this the town?" I asked feebly.

"Not yet. A little farther!"

I was limping, drenched, irritable. But now and then the absurdity of my situation overcame me and I laughed. Water ran down my head and off my nose, trickled down my neck under my coat. I felt like a great sponge. And suddenly I remembered my hat.

"I feel sure," I said, stopping still in the road, "that the chauffeur will go inside the car out of the rain and sit on my hat."

The officer thought this very likely. I felt extremely bitter about it. The more I thought of it the more I was convinced that he was exactly the sort of chauffeur who would get into a car and sit on an only hat.

At last we came to the town—to what had been a town. It was a town no longer. Walls without roofs, roofs almost without walls. Here and there only a chimney standing of what had been a home; a street so torn up by shells that walking was almost impossible—full of shell-holes that had become graves. There were now no lights, not even soldiers. In the silence our footsteps re-echoed against those desolate and broken walls.

A day or two ago I happened on a description of this town, written by a man who had seen it at the time I was there.

"The main street," he writes, "is like a great museum of prehistoric fauna. The house roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists left naked, have tilted forward on to the sidewalks, so that they hang in mid-air like giant vertebrae.... One house only of the whole village of —— had been spared."

We stumbled down the street toward the trenches and at last stopped before a house. Through boards nailed across what had once been windows a few rays of light escaped. There was no roof; a side wall and an entire corner were gone. It was the residence of the ladies of the decoration.

Inside there was for a moment an illusion of entirety. The narrow corridor that ran through the centre of the house was weatherproof. But through some unseen gap rushed the wind of the night. At the right, warm with lamplight, was the reception room, dining room and bedroom—one small chamber about twelve by fifteen!

What a strange room it was, furnished with odds and ends from the shattered houses about! A bed in the corner; a mattress on the floor; a piano in front of the shell-holed windows, a piano so badly cracked by shrapnel that panels of the woodwork were missing and keys gone; two or three odd chairs and what had once been a bookcase, and in the centre a pine table laid for a meal.

Mrs. K——, whose uncle was a cabinet minister, was hurrying in with a frying-pan in her hand.

"The mutton!" she said triumphantly, and placed it on the table, frying-pan and all. The other lady of the decoration followed with the potatoes, also in the pan in which they had been cooked.

We drew up our chairs, for the mutton must not be allowed to get cold.

"It's quite a party, isn't it?" said one of the hostesses, and showed us proudly the dish of fruit on the centre of the table, flanked by bonbons and nuts which had just been sent from England.

True, the fruit was a little old and the nuts were few; but they gave the table a most festive look.

Some one had taken off my shoes and they were drying by the fire, stuffed with paper to keep them in shape. My soaking outer garments had been carried to the lean-to kitchen to hang by the stove, and dry under the care of a soldier servant who helped with the cooking. I looked at him curiously. His predecessor had been killed in the room where he stood.

The German batteries were firing, and every now and then from the trenches at the foot of the street came the sharp ping of rifles. No one paid any attention. We were warm and sheltered from the wind. What if the town was being shelled and the Germans were only six hundred feet away? We were getting dry, and there was mutton for dinner.

It was a very cheerful party—the two young ladies, and a third who had joined them temporarily, a doctor who was taking influenza and added little to the conversation, the chauffeur attached to the house, who was a count in ordinary times, a Belgian major who had come up from the trenches to have a real meal, and the English officer who had taken me out.

Outside the door stood the major's Congo servant, a black boy who never leaves him, following with dog-like fidelity into the trenches and sleeping outside his door when the major is in billet. He had picked him up in the Congo years before during his active service there.

The meal went on. The frying-pan was passed. The food was good and the talk was better. It was indiscriminately rapid French and English. When it was English I replied. When it was French I ate.

The hostess presented me with a shrapnel case which had arrived that day on the doorstep.

"If you are collecting trophies," said the major, "I shall get you a German sentry this evening. How would you like that?"

There was a reckless twinkle in the major's eye. It developed that he had captured several sentries and liked playing the game.

But I did not know the man. So I said: "Certainly, it would be most interesting."

Whereupon he rose. It took all the combined effort of the dinner party to induce him to sit down and continue his meal. He was vastly disappointed. He was a big man with a humorous mouth. The idea of bringing me a German sentry to take home as a trophy appealed to him.

The meal went on. No one seemed to consider the circumstances extraordinary. Now and then I remembered the story of the street fighting a few nights before. I had an idea that these people would keep on eating and talking English politics quite calmly in the event of a German charge. I wondered if I could live up to my reputation for courage in such a crisis.