But now that spring had come the earth-men had emerged from their holes to bask in the sun again, and with that love of beauty which is instinctive in a Frenchman’s heart, they were planting gardens and shrubberies outside their chalk dwellings with allegorical designs in cockle-shells or white stones.

“Tres chic!” said the commandant to a group of soldiers proud to their handicraft.

And chic also, though touching in its sentiment, was a little graveyard behind a fringe of branches which mask a French battery.  The gunners were still at work plugging out shells over the enemy’s lines, from which came answering shells with the challenge of death, but they had found time to decorate the graves of the comrades who had been “unfortunate.”  They had twined wild flowers about the wooden crosses and made borders of blossom about those mounds of earth.  It was the most beautiful cemetery in which I have ever stood with bared head.  Death was busy not far away.  Great guns were speaking in deep, reverberating tones, which gave a solemn import to the day; but Nature was singing to a different tune.

“It is strange, is it not,” said our commandant, “this contrast between war and peace?  Those cherry trees comfort one’s spirit.”

He was a soldier in every fibre of his being, but behind those keen, piercing eyes of his there was the sentiment of France stirred now by the beauty through which we passed, in spite of war.  We drove for a mile or more down a long, straight road which was an avenue of cherry trees.  They made an archway of white blossom above our heads, and the warm sun of the day drew out their perfume.  Away on either side of us the fields were streaked with long rays of brilliant yellow where saffron grew as though the sun had split bars of molten metal there, and below the hillside the pear-blossom and cherry-blossom which bloomed in deserted orchards lay white and gleaming like snow on the Swiss peaks in summer.

“Even war is less horrible now that the sun shines,” said a French officer.

The sky was cloudlessly blue, but as I gazed up into a patch of it, where a winged machine flew high with a humming song, five tiny white clouds appeared quite suddenly.

“They are shelling him,” said the commandant.  “Pretty close too.”

Invisible in the winged machine was a French aviator, reconnoitring the German lines away over Beausejour.  Afterwards he became visible, and I talked with him when he had landed in the aviation field, where a number of aeroplanes stood ready for flight.

“They touched her three times,” he said, pointing to his machine.  “You can see the holes where the shrapnel bullets pierced the metal sheath.”

He showed me how he worked his mitrailleuse, and then strolled away to light a cigarette against the wind.  He had done his morning job, and had escaped death in the air by half an inch or so.  But in the afternoon he would go up again—­2000 feet up above the German guns—­and thought no more of it than of just a simple duty with a little sport to keep his spirits up.