We went past the soldiers sitting on the ledge and stole down and down, to where the trees ended at the bottom of the ravine.  The sharp-shooter had stopped firing, and nothing disturbed the leafy silence but an intermittent drip of rain.  We were at the end of the burrow, and the Captain signed to me that I might take a cautious peep round its corner.  I looked out and saw a strip of intensely green meadow just under me, and a wooded cliff rising abruptly on its other side.  That was all.  The wooded cliff swarmed with “them,” and a few steps would have carried us across the interval; yet all about us was silence, and the peace of the forest.  Again, for a minute, I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol of hate.  Then the reaction of the unbelief set in, and I felt myself in a harmless ordinary glen, like a million others on an untroubled earth.  We turned and began to climb again, loop by loop, up the “bowel”—­we passed the lolling soldiers, the silent mitrailleuse, we came again to the watcher at his peep-hole.  He heard us, let the officer pass, and turned his head with a little sign of understanding.

“Do you want to look down?”

He moved a step away from his window.  The look-out projected over the ravine, raking its depths; and here, with one’s eye to the leaf-lashed hole, one saw at last ... saw, at the bottom of the harmless glen, half way between cliff and cliff, a grey uniform huddled in a dead heap.  “He’s been there for days:  they can’t fetch him away,” said the watcher, regluing his eye to the hole; and it was almost a relief to find it was after all a tangible enemy hidden over there across the meadow...

The sun had set when we got back to our starting-point in the underground village.  The chasseurs-a-pied were lounging along the roadside and standing in gossiping groups about the motor.  It was long since they had seen faces from the other life, the life they had left nearly a year earlier and had not been allowed to go back to for a day; and under all their jokes and good-humour their farewell had a tinge of wistfulness.  But one felt that this fugitive reminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like a dream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality:  the business of holding their bit of France.

It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier’s single-mindedness is so strong in all who have had even a glimpse of the front; perhaps it is gathered less from what the men say than from the look in their eyes.  Even while they are accepting cigarettes and exchanging trench-jokes, the look is there; and when one comes on them unaware it is there also.  In the dusk of the forest that look followed us down the mountain; and as we skirted the edge of the ravine between the armies, we felt that on the far side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on the near side the men who had been made by it.