Alone, quiet, at the end of the passage under the German lines sat an old poilu, the sentinel of the tunnel.  He was an old coal miner of the North.  The light of a candle showed his quiet, bearded face, grave as the countenance of some sculptured saint on the portico of a Gothic church, and revealed the wrinkles and lines of many years of labor.  The sentinel held a microphone to his ears; the poles of it disappearing into the wall of damp earth separating us from the Boches.

Hippolyte whispered, “You hear them?”

The old man nodded his head, and gave the microphone to his officer.  I saw Hippolyte listen.  Then, without a word, he handed it to me.  All that I could hear was a faint tapping.

“The Boches,” whispered Hippolyte.

The French blew up the sape early in the afternoon, at a time when they felt sure the Germans were at work in their tunnel.  I saw the result the next day.  A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five feet in diameter, and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No Man’s Land.  Even the stumps of two trees had sunk and tilted.

It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity.  I once talked the matter over with him.  He became at once intense, Latin, doctrinaire.

“How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have to do?”

“I do not have to reconcile my theories to my office; I am furthering my theories.”

“How so?”

“By combating the Boches.  Without them we might have realized our idea of universal peace and fraternity.  Voila l’ennemi!  The race is a poisonous race, serpents, massacreurs!  I wish I could smother as many of them every day as I did yesterday.”

During my service I did not meet another soldier whose hatred of the Germans was comparable to that of this advocate of universal love.

I left the trenches just at dusk.  Above the dreadful depression in No Man’s Land shone a bronzy sky against which the trees raised their haggard silhouettes.  There was hardly a sound in the whole length of The Wood.  A mist came up making haloes round the rising winter stars.

Chapter VI

The Germans Attack

The schoolmaster (instituteur) and the schoolmistress (institutrice) of Montauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on the second story of the schoolhouse.  The kitchen of this fiat had been struck by a shell, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and glass, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of a copper saucepan still hanging on the wall.  In one of the rooms, else quite bare of furniture, was an upright piano.  Sometimes while stationed at Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the trenches in playing this instrument.