There was a specimen tree—­a tree worthy of such a park—­the sort of tree visitors are always taken to admire.  A ladder ran up it to a platform.  What little wind there was swayed the tall top, and the ladder creaked like a ship’s gangway.  A telephone bell tinkled 50 foot overhead.  Two invisible guns spoke fervently for half a minute, and broke off like terriers choked on a leash.  We climbed till the topmost platform swayed sicklily beneath us.  Here one found a rustic shelter, always of the tea-garden pattern, a table, a map, and a little window wreathed with living branches that gave one the first view of the Devil and all his works.  It was a stretch of open country, with a few sticks like old tooth-brushes which had once been trees round a farm.  The rest was yellow grass, barren to all appearance as the veldt.

“The grass is yellow because they have used gas here,” said an
officer.   “Their trenches are------.   You can see for
yourself.”

The guns in the woods began again.  They seemed to have no relation to the regularly spaced bursts of smoke along a little smear in the desert earth two thousand yards away—­no connection at all with the strong voices overhead coming and going.  It was as impersonal as the drive of the sea along a breakwater.

Thus it went:  a pause—­a gathering of sound like the race of an incoming wave; then the high-flung heads of breakers spouting white up the face of a groyne.  Suddenly, a seventh wave broke and spread the shape of its foam like a plume overtopping all the others.

“That’s one of our torpilleurs—­what you call trench-sweepers,” said the observer among the whispering leaves.

Some one crossed the platform to consult the map with its ranges.  A blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a little beyond the large plume.  It was as though the tide had struck a reef out yonder.

Then a new voice of tremendous volume lifted itself out of a lull that followed.  Somebody laughed.  Evidently the voice was known.

“That is not for us,” a gunner said.   “They are being waked up
from------” he named a distant French position.   “So and so is
attending to them there.   We go on with our usual work.   Look! 
Another torpilleur.”

“The barbarian”

Again a big plume rose; and again the lighter shells broke at their appointed distance beyond it.  The smoke died away on that stretch of trench, as the foam of a swell dies in the angle of a harbour wall, and broke out afresh half a mile lower down.  In its apparent laziness, in its awful deliberation, and its quick spasms of wrath, it was more like the work of waves than of men; and our high platform’s gentle sway and glide was exactly the motion of a ship drifting with us toward that shore.

“The usual work.  Only the usual work,” the officer explained.  “Sometimes it is here.  Sometimes above or below us.  I have been here since May.”