Once only in the night there is a clatter opposite—­one machine-gun started it, then two together, then forty or fifty rifles.  Perhaps they think they saw a patrol.  The Turks used to get precisely similar nerve-storms on Russell’s Top.  Nobody even troubles to remark it.  Dawn breaks over the watching figures without one incident to report.

It is after the light has grown and become fixed that you will notice, if you look carefully for it, a thin film of blue smoke floating upwards from behind the sandbags on the other side of No Man’s Land.  Only a hundred and fifty yards away from you the German cook must be fitting his old browned and burned dixies and kerosene tins over their early morning fire.

We had our early morning coffee, too.  And as we walked homewards we found that from a particular point we were looking straight at a distant barn roof which is in German territory.  Near it, towards his trenches, ran a road.  Of curiosity we turned our telescopes on to that path, and while we watched there strolled along it two figures in grey—­grey tunics, grey loose trousers, little grey buttony caps, walking down the path towards us, talking, at their ease.  Twenty seconds later along came another pair.

Clearly they had said to themselves, “We must not walk about here except in twos or threes or we shall draw a shell from one of those Verfluchte British whizz-bangs.”

And so those Germans strolled—­as we did—­from their breakfast to their daily work.

CHAPTER VII

THE PLANES

France, May.

Gallipoli had its own special difficulties for aeroplanes.  There was no open space on which they could dream of alighting at Anzac; and one machine which had to come down at Suvla was shelled to pieces as soon as it landed.  So planes had to live at Imbros, and there were ten miles of sea to be crossed before work began and after it finished, and some planes, which went out and were never heard of, were probably lost in that sea.  There were brave flights far over the enemy’s country.  But, until the very last days at Helles, there was scarcely ever an enemy’s plane which put up a successful fight against our own.

In France the enemy is almost as much in the air as we are.  He has to be reckoned with all the time, and fierce fighting in the air, either against German machines or in face of German shell-fire such as we scarcely even imagined in watching the air-fighting of Gallipoli, is the daily spectacle of the trenches.  We have seen a brave flight by a German low down within rifle-shot.  But never anything to compare with the indifference to danger of the British pilots.