The enemy did not often allow the young gentleman to sleep, and about the windmill the shells were bursting.

They reached one Sunday morning almost as far as the little twelfth-century church to which the young officer had stepped down from his windmill to hear Mass in the middle of a crowd of soldiers chanting the office, recited by a soldier, accompanied by a harmonium played by another soldier.  The windows were shattered, and a beautiful old house next to the church lay in ruins.

The officer spent lonely hours in the windmill in charge of the telephone exchange, from which the batteries were worked.  The men in the trenches and the gun-pits pitied his loneliness, and invented a scheme to cheer him up.  So after dark, when the cannonade slackened, he put the receiver to his ears and listened to a Tyrolese ballad sung by an orderly, and to the admirable imitation of a barking dog performed by a sapper, and to a Parisian chanson delightfully rendered by the aviator.

“Bonne nuit, maman,” wrote the officer of artillery at the end of each letter from his windmill.

8

The front did not change its outline on the map, except by hairbreadths, for months at a stretch, yet at many points of the line there were desperate battles, a bayonet charge now and then, and hours of frightful slaughter, when men saw red and killed with joy.

There was a little farm near Steinbach round which a battle raged for many days.  Leading to it was a sunken road, defended by the enemy, until one day they put up a number of non-combatants from captured villages to prevent a French attack.

“Among them we could distinguish a woman, with her hair falling to her shoulders and her hands tied behind her back.  This new infamy inflamed the courage of our soldiers.  A company rushed forward with fixed bayonets.  The road to the farm was swept by the enemy’s fire, but nothing stopped our men.  In spite of our losses we carried the position and are masters of the farm.  There was no mercy in those moments of triumph.  The ghastly business of war was done to the uttermost.”

There were ghastly things in some of the enemy’s trenches.  One of the worst of them was seen in the forest of Apremont, in the district of Woevre, where the enemy was strongly entrenched in some quarries quite close to the French trenches which sapped their way forward to those pits.  When the guns ceased firing the French soldiers often heard the sound of singing.  But above the voices of the Germans there came sometimes a series of piercing cries like the screeching of an owl in a terrible plaint, followed by strange and bloodcurdling laughter.  It was the voice of a mad woman who was one of those captured from neighbouring villages and brought into the trenches by the Germans.  One day the German soldiers carried her the length of their own trenches.  Only her head was visible above the ground.  She wore a German helmet above the wild hair which blew in wisps about her death-white face, and it seemed like a vision of hell as she passed shrieking with the laughter of insanity.