The men smoked and talked.  An officer came up from the trenches to smoke his after-dinner pipe, a bearded individual, who apologised for his muddy condition.  He and the major played a duet.  They made a great fuss about their preparation for it.  The stool must be so, the top of the cracked piano raised.  They turned and bowed to us profoundly.  Then sat down and played—­CHOP STICKS!

But that was only the beginning.  For both of them were accomplished musicians.  The major played divinely.  He played a Rhapsodie Hongroise, the Moonlight Sonata, one of the movements of the Sonata Appassionata.  He played without notes, a bulldog pipe gripped firmly in his teeth, blue clouds encircling his fair hair.  Gone was the reckless soldier who would have taken his life in his hands for the whim of bringing in a German sentry.  Instead there was a Belgian whose ruined country lay behind him, whose people lay dead in thousands of hideous graves, whose heart was torn and aching with the things that it knew and buried.  We sat silent.  His pipe died in his mouth; his eyes, fixed on the shell-riddled wall, grew sombre.  When the music ceased his hands still lay lingeringly on the keys.  And, beyond the foot of the street, the ominous guns of the army that had ruined his country crashed steadily.

We were rather subdued when the music died away.  But he evidently regretted having put a weight on the spirits of the party.  He rose and brought me a charming little water-colour sketch he had made of the bit of No Man’s Land in front of his trench, with the German line beyond it.

“By the way,” he said in his exact English, “I went to art school in Dresden with an American named Reinhart.  Afterward he became a great painter—­Charles Stanley Reinhart.  Is he by any chance a relative?”

“Charles Stanley Reinhart is dead,” I said.  “He was a Pittsburgher, too, but the two families are connected only by marriage.”

“Dead!  So he is dead too!  Everybody is dead.  He—­he was a very nice boy.”

Suddenly he stood up and stretched his long arms.

“It was a long time ago,” he said.  “Now I go for the sentry.”

They caught him at the door, however, and brought him back.

“But it is so simple,” he protested.  “No one is hurt.  And the American lady—­”

The American lady protested.

“I don’t want a German sentry,” I said.  “I shouldn’t know what to do with a German sentry if I had one.”

So he sat down and explained his method to me.  I wish I could tell his method here.  It sounded so easy.  Evidently it was a safety-valve, during that long wait of the deadlock, for his impetuous temperament.  One could picture him sitting in his trench day after day among the soldiers who adored him, making little water-colour sketches and smoking his bulldog pipe, and then suddenly, as now, rising and stretching his long arms and saying: 

“Well, boys, I guess I’ll go out and bring one in.”