“See,” said our lieutenant calmly, with no more emotion than he would have shown at a bonfire—­“those are the German trenches.  We have just fired a shell into them.”

Two minutes more took us into the dead, deserted city of Pont-a-Mousson.  The road was now everywhere screened carefully with lengths of light-brown burlap, and there was not a single house that did not bear witness to the power of a shell.  The sense of “the front” began to possess me, never to go, the sense of being in the vicinity of a tremendous power.  A ruined village, or a deserted town actually on the front does not bring to mind any impression of decay, for the intellect tends rather to consider t\& means by which the destruction has been accomplished.  One sees villages of the swathes so completely blown to pieces that they are literally nothing but earthy mounds of rubbish, and seeing them thus, in a plain still fiercely disputed night and day between one’s own side and the invisible enemy, the mind feels itself in the presence of force, titanic, secret, and hostile.

Beyond Pont-a-Mousson the road led directly to the trenches of the Bois-le-Pretre, less than half a mile away.  But the disputed trenches were hidden behind the trees, and I could not see them.  Through the silence of the deserted town sounded the muffled boom of shells and trench engines bursting in the wood beyond, and every now and then clouds of gray-black smoke from the explosion would rise above the brown leaves of the ash trees.  The smoke of these explosions rose straight upwards in a foggy column, such as a locomotive might make if, halted on its tracks somewhere in the wood, it had put coal on its fires.

With the next day I began my service at the trenches, but the war began for me that very night.

A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted apartment house had been assigned me.  It was nine o’clock, and I was getting ready to roll up in my blankets and go to sleep.  Beneath the starlit heavens the street below was black as pitch save when a trench light, floating serenely down the sky, illuminated with its green-white glow the curving road and the line of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous villas.  There was not a sound to be heard outside of an occasional rifle shot in the trenches, sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet balls.  I went round to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen windows to the lines.  A little action, some quarrel of sentries, perhaps, was going on behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river.  Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad track running across the un-harvested fields.  Gleaming palely through the French window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed the deserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished water-tap above the stone sink.  The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke upon my ears.