And, if he had been ordered to stay there and hold the trench alone, one could imagine him saying, in that same tone of deference and chipper good humor, “Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” and staying, too, till the cows came home.

We motored down the line to another trench—­this one along a road with fields in front and, about a couple of hundred yards behind, a clump of trees which masked a Belgian battery.  The officer here, a tall, upstanding, gravely handsome young man, with a deep, strong, slightly humorous voice, and the air of one both born to and used to command—­the best type of navy man—­came over to meet us, rather glad, it seemed, to see some one.  The ambulance officer had just started to speak when there was a roar from the clump of trees, at the same instant an explosion directly overhead, and an ugly chunk of iron—­a bit of broken casing from a shrapnel shell—­plunged at our very feet.  The shell had been wrongly timed and exploded prematurely.

“I say!” the lieutenant called out to a Belgian officer standing not far away, “can’t you telephone over to your people to stop that?  That’s the third time we’ve been nearly hit by their shrapnel this morning.  After all”—­he turned to us with the air of apologizing somewhat for his display of irritation—­“it’s quite annoying enough here without that, you know.”

It was, indeed, annoying—­very.  The trenches were not under fire in the sense that the enemy were making a persistent effort to clear them out, but they were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and there was no telling, when that distant boom thudded across the fields, whether that particular shell might be intended for them or for somebody’s house in town.

We could see in the distance their captive balloon, and there were a couple of scouts, the officer said, in a tower in the village, not much more than half a mile away.  He pointed to the spot across the barbed wire.  “We’ve been trying to get them for the last half-hour.”

We left them engaged in this interesting distraction, the little rifle-snaps in all that mighty thundering seeming only to accent the loneliness and helplessness of their position, and spun on down the transverse road, toward another trench.  The progress of the motor seemed slow and disappointing.  Not that the spot a quarter of a mile off was at all less likely to be hit, yet one felt conscious of a growing desire to be somewhere else.  And, though I took off my hat to keep it from blowing off, I found that every time a shell went over I promptly put it on again, indicating, one suspected, a decline in what the military experts call morale.

As we bowled down the road toward a group of brick houses on the left, a shell passed not more than fifty yards in front of us and through the side of one of these houses as easily as a circus rider pops through a tissue-paper hoop.  Almost at the same instant another exploded—­where, I haven’t the least idea, except that the dust from it hit us in the face.  The motor rolled smoothly along meanwhile, and the Belgian soldier driving it stared as imperturbably ahead of him as if he were back at Antwerp on the seat of his taxicab.