We walked just behind the trenches in the moonlight for a mile.  No one said anything.  The wind was icy.  Across the railroad embankment it chopped the inundation into small crested waves.  Only by putting one’s head down was it possible to battle ahead.  From Dixmude came the intermittent red flashes of guns.  But the trenches beside us were entirely silent.

At the end of a mile we stopped.  The road turned abruptly to the right and crossed the railroad embankment, and at this crossing was the ruin of what had been the House of the Barrier, where in peaceful times the crossing tender lived.

It had been almost destroyed.  The side toward the German lines was indeed a ruin, but one room was fairly whole.  However, the door had been shot away.  To enter, it was necessary to lift away an extemporised one of planks roughly nailed together, which leaned against the aperture.

The moving of the door showed more firelight, and a very small, shaded and smoky lamp on a stand.  There were officers here again.  The little house is slightly in front of the advanced trenches, and once inside it was possible to realise its exposed position.  Standing as it does on the elevation of the railroad, it is constantly under fire.  It is surrounded by barbed wire and flanked by trenches in which are mitrailleuses.

The walls were full of shell holes, stuffed with sacks of straw or boarded over.  What had been windows were now jagged openings, similarly closed.  The wind came through steadily, smoking the chimney of the lamp and making the flame flicker.

There was one chair.

I wish I could go farther.  I wish I could say that shells were bursting overhead, and that I sat calmly in the one chair and made notes.  I sat, true enough, but I sat because I was tired and my feet were wet.  And instead of making notes I examined my new six-guinea silk rubber rain cape for barbed-wire tears.  Not a shell came near.  The German battery across had ceased firing at dusk that evening, and was playing pinochle four hundred yards away across the inundation.  The snipers were writing letters home.

It is true that any time an artilleryman might lose a game and go out and fire a gun to vent his spleen or to keep his hand in.  And the snipers might begin to notice that the rain was over, and that there was suspicious activity at the House of the Barrier.  And, to take away the impression of perfect peace, big guns were busy just north and south of us.  Also, just where we were the Germans had made a terrific charge three nights before to capture an outpost.  But the fact remains that I brought away not even a bullet hole through the crown of my soft felt hat.

CHAPTER XII

NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES

When I had been thawed out they took me into the trenches.  Because of the inundation directly in front, they are rather shallow, and at this point were built against the railroad embankment with earth, boards, and here and there a steel rail from the track.  Some of them were covered, too, but not with bombproof material.  The tops were merely shelters from the rain and biting wind.