“We are quite at home here,” said one of the French officers, leading the way through a boyau, or tunnel, to a row of underground dwellings which had been burrowed out of the earth below a high ridge overlooking the German positions opposite Perthes, Mesnil-lez-Hurlus, and Beause-jour, where there had been some of the most ferocious fighting in the war, so that the names of those places have been written in blood upon the history of France.

“You see we have made ourselves as comfortable as possible,” said the general, who received us at the doorway of the little hole which, with delightful irony, he called his “palace.”  He is an elderly man, this general who has held in check some of the most violent assaults of the German army, but there was a boyish smile in his eyes and none of the harshness of old age in the sweetness of his voice.  He lived in a hole in the earth with just a peep-hole out of which he could see the German lines on the opposite hills and his won trenches down below.  As he spread out his maps and explained the positions of his batteries and lines, I glanced round his room—­at the truckle-bed which filled the length of it, and the deal table over which he was bending, and the wooden chair in which he sat to think out the problems of his task.  There was only one touch of colour in this hole in the hillside, and it belonged to a bunch of carnations placed in a German shell and giving out a rich odour so that some of the beauty of spring had come into this hiding-place where an old man directed the operations of death.  “Look,” said the general, pointing to the opposite lines, “here is Crest 196, about which you gentlemen have written so much in newspapers.”

It was just a rise in the ground above the ravine which divided us from the German ridges, but I gazed at it with a thrill, remembering what waves of blood have washed around this hillock, and how many heroes of France have given their lives to gain that crest.  Faintly I could see the lines of German trenches with their earthworks thrown up along the hillsides and along the barren fields on each side of the ravine, where French and German soldiers are very close to each other’s tunnels.  From where we stood subterranean passages led to the advanced trenches down there, and to a famous “trapeze” on the right of the German position, forming an angle behind the enemy’s lines, so that now and again their soldiers might be seen.

“It is not often in this war that we can see our enemy unless we visit them in their trenches, or they come to us,” said the general, “but a few days ago, when I was in the trapeze, I saw one of them stooping down as though gathering something in his hands or tying up his boot-laces.”  Those words were spoken by a man who had commanded French troops for nine months of incessant fighting which reveal the character of this amazing war.  He was delighted because he had seen a German soldier in the open and found it a strange unusual thing.