“We are within about sixty yards of the Germans,” said Captain P------
at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the
braziers well behind.

Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about twenty feet apart.  Snug behind one was a German and behind the other an Irishman, both listening.  They were within easy bombing range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a truce.  Sixty yards!  Pace it off.  It is not far.  In other places the enemies have been as close as five yards—­only a wall of earth between them.  Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.

The Germans were as busy as beavers dam-building.  They had a lot of work to do before they had their new defences right.  We heard them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches of sentences intelligible, and occasionally the energetic, shouted, guttural commands of their officers.  All through that night I never heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone.  The orders were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable kindliness.  I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men showed for Captain P------, and I was beginning to appreciate that it was not a particular instance.

“What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t have it; he’d get rebellious,” was the reply.  “No, you mustn’t yell at Tommy.  He’s a little temperamental about some things and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine.”

Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier.  Discipline means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers.  Each army and each people to its own ways.

Sixty yards!  And the dead between the trenches and death lurking ready at a trigger’s pull should life show itself!  When daylight comes the British sing out their “Good-morning, Germans!” and the Germans answer, “Good-morning, British!” without adding, “We hope to kill some of you to-day!” Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint across through their periscopes.  At the gibe business the German is, perhaps, better than the Briton.