BEHIND THE GERMAN LINES

The valley held and increased the sounds till they seemed to hit our hillside like a sea.

A change of light showed a village, exquisitely pencilled atop of a hill, with reddish haze at its feet.

“What is that place?” I asked.

The priest replied in a voice as deep as an organ:   “That is
Saint------  It is in the Boche lines.   Its condition is
pitiable.”

The thunders and the smokes rolled up and diminished and renewed themselves, but the small children romped up and down the old stone steps; the beginner’s aeroplane unsteadily chased its own shadow over the fields; and the soldiers in billet asked the band for their favourite tunes.

Said the lieutenant of local Guards as the cars went on:  “She—­play—­Tipperary.”

And she did—­to an accompaniment of heavy pieces in the hills, which followed us into a town all ringed with enormous searchlights, French and Boche together, scowling at each other beneath the stars.

. . . .

It happened about that time that Lord Kitchener with General Joffre reviewed a French Army Corps.

We came on it in a vast dip of ground under grey clouds, as one comes suddenly on water; for it lay out in misty blue lakes of men mixed with darker patches, like osiers and undergrowth, of guns, horses, and wagons.  A straight road cut the landscape in two along its murmuring front.

VETERANS OF THE WAR

It was as though Cadmus had sown the dragon’s teeth, not in orderly furrows but broadcast, till, horrified by what arose, he had emptied out the whole bag and fled.  But these were no new warriors.  The record of their mere pitched battles would have satiated a Napoleon.  Their regiments and batteries had learnt to achieve the impossible as a matter of routine, and in twelve months they had scarcely for a week lost direct contact with death.  We went down the line and looked into the eyes of those men with the used bayonets and rifles; the packs that could almost stow themselves on the shoulders that would be strange without them; at the splashed guns on their repaired wheels, and the easy-working limbers.  One could feel the strength and power of the mass as one feels the flush of heat from off a sunbaked wall.  When the Generals’ cars arrived there, there was no loud word or galloping about.  The lakes of men gathered into straight-edged battalions; the batteries aligned a little; a squadron reined back or spurred up; but it was all as swiftly smooth as the certainty with which a man used to the pistol draws and levels it at the required moment.  A few peasant women saw the Generals alight.  The aeroplanes, which had been skimming low as swallows along the front of the line (theirs must have been a superb view) ascended leisurely, and “waited on” like hawks.  Then followed the inspection, and one saw the two figures, tall and short, growing smaller side by side along the white road, till far off among the cavalry they entered their cars again, and moved along the horizon to another rise of grey-green plain.