This is a new warfare, one of artillery, supported by infantry in trenches.  And it has been necessary to make new laws for it.  One of the most curious is a sort of modus vivendi by which each side protects its own sentries by leaving the enemy’s sentries unmolested so long as there is no active fighting.  They are always in plain view before the trenches.  In case of a charge they are the first to be shot, of course.  But long nights and days have gone by along certain parts of the front where the hostile trenches are close together, and the sentries, keeping their monotonous lookout, have been undisturbed.

No doubt by this time the situation has changed to a certain extent; there has been more active fighting, larger bodies of men are involved.  The spring floods south of the inundation will have dried up.  No Man’s Land will have ceased to be a swamp and the deadlock may be broken.

But on that February night I put my faith in this agreement, and it held.

The tall Belgian officer asked me if I was frightened.  I said I was not.  This was not exactly the truth; but it was no time for the truth.

“They are not shooting,” I said.  “It looks perfectly safe.”

He shrugged his shoulders and glanced toward the German trenches.

“They have been sleeping during the rain,” he said briefly.  “But when one of them wakes up, look out!”

After that there was little conversation, and what there was was in whispers.

As we proceeded the stench from the beautiful moonlit water grew overpowering.  The officer told me the reason.

A little farther along a path of fascines had been built out over the inundation to an outpost halfway to the German trenches.  The building of this narrow roadway had cost many lives.

Half a mile along the road we were sharply challenged by a sentry.  When he had received the password he stood back and let us pass.  Alone, in that bleak and exposed position in front of the trenches, always in full view as he paced back and forward, carbine on shoulder, with not even a tree trunk or a hedge for shelter, the first to go at the whim of some German sniper or at any indication of an attack, he was a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure.  He looked very young too.  I stopped and asked him in a whisper how old he was.

He said he was nineteen!

He may have been.  I know something about boys, and I think he was seventeen at the most.  There are plenty of boys of that age doing just what that lad was doing.

Afterward I learned that it was no part of the original plan to take a woman over the fascine path to the outpost; that Captain F——­ ground his teeth in impotent rage when he saw where I was being taken.  But it was not possible to call or even to come up to us.  So, blithely and unconsciously the tall Belgian officer and I turned to the right, and I was innocently on my way to the German trenches.