Meanwhile, they had made the best of the situation and turned their quarters into a forest colony that would enchant any normal boy.  Their village architecture was more elaborate than any we had yet seen.  In the Colonel’s “dugout” a long table decked with lilacs and tulips was spread for tea.  In other cheery catacombs we found neat rows of bunks, mess-tables, sizzling sauce-pans over kitchen-fires.  Everywhere were endless ingenuities in the way of camp-furniture and household decoration.  Farther down the road a path between fir-boughs led to a hidden hospital, a marvel of underground compactness.  While we chatted with the surgeon a soldier came in from the trenches:  an elderly, bearded man, with a good average civilian face—­the kind that one runs against by hundreds in any French crowd.  He had a scalp-wound which had just been dressed, and was very pale.  The Colonel stopped to ask a few questions, and then, turning to him, said:  “Feeling rather better now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.  In a day or two you’ll be thinking about going back to the trenches, eh?”

“I’m going now, sir.” It was said quite simply, and received in the same way.  “Oh, all right,” the Colonel merely rejoined; but he laid his hand on the man’s shoulder as we went out.

Our next visit was to a sod-thatched hut, “At the sign of the Ambulant Artisans,” where two or three soldiers were modelling and chiselling all kinds of trinkets from the aluminum of enemy shells.  One of the ambulant artisans was just finishing a ring with beautifully modelled fauns’ heads, another offered me a “Pickelhaube” small enough for Mustard-seed’s wear, but complete in every detail, and inlaid with the bronze eagle from an Imperial pfennig.  There are many such ringsmiths among the privates at the front, and the severe, somewhat archaic design of their rings is a proof of the sureness of French taste; but the two we visited happened to be Paris jewellers, for whom “artisan” was really too modest a pseudonym.  Officers and men were evidently proud of their work, and as they stood hammering away in their cramped smithy, a red gleam lighting up the intentness of their faces, they seemed to be beating out the cheerful rhythm of “I too will something make, and joy in the making."...

Up the hillside, in deeper shadow, was another little structure; a wooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles and flowers.  Here mass is said by one of the conscript priests of the regiment, while his congregation kneel between the fir-trunks, giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral-forest.  Near by was the grave-yard, where day by day these quiet elderly men lay their comrades, the peres de famille who don’t go back.  The care of this woodland cemetery is left entirely to the soldiers, and they have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the graves.  Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover