HANDY TRENCH-SWEEPERS

I loved that Colonel!  He knew his men and he knew the Boches —­had them marked down like birds.  When he said they were beside dead trees or behind boulders, sure enough there they were!  But, as I have said, the dinner-hour is always slack, and even when we came to a place where a section of trench had been bashed open by trench-sweepers, and it was recommended to duck and hurry, nothing much happened.  The uncanny thing was the absence of movement in the Boche trenches.  Sometimes one imagined that one smelt strange tobacco, or heard a rifle-bolt working after a shot.  Otherwise they were as still as pig at noonday.

We held on through the maze, past trench-sweepers of a handy light pattern, with their screw-tailed charge all ready; and a grave or so; and when I came on men who merely stood within easy reach of their rifles, I knew I was in the second line.  When they lay frankly at ease in their dug-outs, I knew it was the third.  A shot-gun would have sprinkled all three.

“No flat plains,” said Alan.  “No hunting for gun positions —­the hills are full of them—­and the trenches close together and commanding each other.  You see what a beautiful country it is.”

The Colonel confirmed this, but from another point of view.  War was his business, as the still woods could testify—­but his hobby was his trenches.  He had tapped the mountain streams and dug out a laundry where a man could wash his shirt and go up and be killed in it, all in a morning; had drained the trenches till a muddy stretch in them was an offence; and at the bottom of the hill (it looked like a hydropathic establishment on the stage) he had created baths where half a battalion at a time could wash.  He never told me how all that country had been fought over as fiercely as Ypres in the West; nor what blood had gone down the valleys before his trenches pushed over the scalped mountain top.  No.  He sketched out new endeavours in earth and stones and trees for the comfort of his men on that populous mountain.

And there came a priest, who was a sub-lieutenant, out of a wood of snuff-brown shadows and half-veiled trunks.  Would it please me to look at a chapel?  It was all open to the hillside, most tenderly and devoutly done in rustic work with reedings of peeled branches and panels of moss and thatch—­St. Hubert’s own shrine.  I saw the hunters who passed before it, going to the chase on the far side of the mountain where their game lay.

. . . . . . .

A BOMBARDED TOWN

Alan carried me off to tea the same evening in a town where he seemed to know everybody.  He had spent the afternoon on another mountain top, inspecting gun positions; whereby he had been shelled a little—­marmite is the slang for it.  There had been no serious marmitage, and he had spotted a Boche position which was marmitable.