We were glad to turn out of the support trench into a communication trench leading toward the front trench; into another gallery cut deep in the fields, with scattered shell-pits on either side.  Still more soldiers, leaning against the walls or seated with their legs stretched out across the bottom of the ditch; more waiting soldiers, only strung out in a line and as used to the passing of shells as people living along the elevated railroad line to the passing of trains.  They did not look up at the screams boring the air any more than one who lives under the trains looks up every time that one passes.  Theirs was the passivity of a queue waiting in line before the entrance to a theatre or a ball-grounds.

A senator or a lawyer, used to coolness in debate, or to presiding over great meetings, or to facing crowds, who happened to visit the trenches could have got reassurance from the faces of any one of these private soldiers, who had been trained not to worry about death till death came.  Harrowing every one of these screams, taken by itself.  Instinctively, unnecessarily, you dodged at those which were low—­unnecessarily, because they were from British guns.  No danger from them unless there was a short fuse.  To the soldiers, the low screams brought the delight of having blows struck from their side at the enemy, whom they themselves could not strike from their reserve position.

For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets.  It was like standing between two railway tracks with trains going in opposite directions.  You came to differentiate between the multitudinous screams.  “Ours!” you exclaimed, with the same delight as when you see that your side has the ball.  The spirit of battle contest rose in you.  There was an end of philosophy.  These soldiers in the trenches were your partisans.  Every British shell was working for them and for you, giving blow for blow.

The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and wounded.  For every man down on your side you want two men down on the enemy’s.  Sport ceases.  It is the fight against a burglar with a revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the enemy, calls for more and harder blows.

Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields, lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the spirit of battle.  The more shells, the more they warble.  It was always so on summer days.  Between the screams you hear their full-pitched chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of German invasion and British resistance.  Mostly, the birds seemed to take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea of ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.

Was this real, or was it extravaganza?  Painted airships and a painted summer sky?  The audacity of those British airmen!  Two of them were spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery-positions, and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.