“At your own risk!” said the staff officer.  If we preferred we could sit on the veranda where there were easy chairs, on a pleasant summer day.  Very peaceful the sweep of the well-kept grounds and the shade of the stately trees of that sequestered world of landscape.  Who was at war?  Why was anyone at war?  Two staff motor-cars awaiting orders on the drive and a dust-laden dispatch rider with messages, who went past toward the rear of the house, were the only visual evidence of war.  The staff officer served us with helmets for protection in case we got into a gas attack.  He said that we might enter our front trenches at a certain point and then work our way as near the new part as we could; division headquarters, four or five miles distant, would show us the way.  It was then that the twinkle in the staff officer’s eye as it looked straight into yours became manifest.  You can never tell, I have learned, just what a twinkle in a British staff officer’s eye may portend.  These fellows who are promoted up from the trenches to join the “brain-trust” in the chateau, know a great deal more about what is going on than you can learn by standing in the road far from the front and listening to the sound of the guns.  We encountered a twinkle in another eye at division headquarters, which may have been telephoned ahead along with the instructions, “At their own risk.”

There are British staff officers who would not mind pulling a correspondent’s leg on a summer day; though, perhaps, it was really the Germans who pulled ours, in this instance.  Somebody did remark at some headquarters, I recall, that “You never know!” which shows that staff officers do not know everything.  The Germans possess half the knowledge—­and they are at great pains not to part with their half.

We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country roads off the main highway.  It has been written again and again, and it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in the rear of the army.  Nothing could be more wonderful and yet nothing more natural.  All the men of fighting age were absent.  White-capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the fields, sat in doorways sewing.  Everybody was at work and the crops were growing.  You never tire of remarking the fact.  It brings you back from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of life.  An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land keeps on producing.  It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern France were good in 1915.  That is cheering news from home for the soldiers of France at the front.

At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point.  If the car went any farther it might draw shell-fire.  Army authorities know how far they may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.