THE SENTINEL HOUNDS

The overwhelming impression was the brilliant health and vitality of these men and the quality of their breeding.  They bore themselves with swing and rampant delight in life, while their voices as they talked in the side-caverns among the stands of arms were the controlled voices of civilization.  Yet, as the lights pierced the gloom they looked like bandits dividing the spoil.  One picture, though far from war, stays with me.  A perfectly built, dark-skinned young giant had peeled himself out of his blue coat and had brought it down with a swish upon the shoulder of a half-stripped comrade who was kneeling at his feet with some footgear.  They stood against a background of semi-luminous blue haze, through which glimmered a pile of coppery straw half covered by a red blanket.  By divine accident of light and pose it St. Martin giving his cloak to the beggar.  There were scores of pictures in these galleries—­notably a rock-hewn chapel where the red of the cross on the rough canvas altar-cloth glowed like a ruby.  Further inside the caves we found a row of little rock-cut kennels, each inhabited by one wise, silent dog.  Their duties begin in at night with the sentinels and listening-posts.  “And believe me,” a proud instructor, “my fellow here knows the difference between the noise of our shells and the Boche shells.”

When we came out into the open again there were good opportunities for this study.  Voices and wings met and passed in the air, and, perhaps, one strong young tree had not been bending quite so far across the picturesque park-drive when we first went that way.

“Oh, yes,” said an officer, “shells have to fall somewhere, and,” he added with fine toleration, “it is, after all, against us that the Boche directs them.  But come you and look at my dug-out.  It’s the most superior of all possible dug-outs.”

“No.  Come and look at our mess.  It’s the Ritz of these parts.”  And they joyously told how they had got, or procured, the various fittings and elegancies, while hands stretched out of the gloom to shake, and men nodded welcome and greeting all through that cheery brotherhood in the woods.

WORK IN THE FIELDS

The voices and the wings were still busy after lunch, when the car slipped past the tea-houses in the drive, and came into a country where women and children worked among the crops.  There were large raw shell holes by the wayside or in the midst of fields, and often a cottage or a villa had been smashed as a bonnet-box is smashed by an umbrella.  That must be part of Belial’s work when he bellows so truculently among the hills to the north.