“What if we had been seen?”

“They’d have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they might have got us.”

“It’s hard to believe,” I said.

So it was, he agreed.  That was the exasperating thing.  Always hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating on a target.  Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute, painstaking economy of war.

We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire instantly.  It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol.  The officer spoke to them and they answered.  It was unnecessary for them to say that they had seen nothing.  If they had we should have known it.  He was out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on the job; that they knew how to watch.  The visit was part of his routine.  We did not even whisper.  Preferably, all whispering would be done by any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and overheard by us.

Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was war.  You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising your head you saw auroras from bursting shells.  We heard at our backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the talk from theirs.  It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides, like that around some camp-fire on the plains.

It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that you might have crawled on up to the Germans and said, “Howdy!” But by the time you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of holes.  That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for which the Germans were looking.  “Well, shall we go back?” asked the officer.  There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog’s.  Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the command of a company of men.

It happened as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless death in their sound.  Oh, yes, there was war in France; unrelenting, shrewd, tireless war.  A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets swarmed.