While we stood watching we heard the sudden scream of a battery close above us.  The crest of the hill we were climbing was alive with “Seventy-fives,” and the piercing noise seemed to burst out at our very backs.  It was the most terrible war-shriek I had heard:  a kind of wolfish baying that called up an image of all the dogs of war simultaneously tugging at their leashes.  There is a dreadful majesty in the sound of a distant cannonade; but these yelps and hisses roused only thoughts of horror.  And there, on the opposite slope, the black and brown geysers were beginning to spout up from the German trenches; and from the batteries above them came the puff and roar of retaliation.  Below us, along the cart-track, the little French soldiers continued to scramble up peacefully to the dilapidated village; and presently a group of officers of dragoons, emerging from the wood, came down to welcome us to their Head-quarters.

We continued to climb through the forest, the cannonade still whistling overhead, till we reached the most elaborate trapper colony we had yet seen.  Half underground, walled with logs, and deeply roofed by sods tufted with ferns and moss, the cabins were scattered under the trees and connected with each other by paths bordered with white stones.  Before the Colonel’s cabin the soldiers had made a banked-up flower-bed sown with annuals; and farther up the slope stood a log chapel, a mere gable with a wooden altar under it, all tapestried with ivy and holly.  Near by was the chaplain’s subterranean dwelling.  It was reached by a deep cutting with ivy-covered sides, and ivy and fir-boughs masked the front.  This sylvan retreat had just been completed, and the officers, the chaplain, and the soldiers loitering near by, were all equally eager to have it seen and hear it praised.

The commanding officer, having done the honours of the camp, led us about a quarter of a mile down the hillside to an open cutting which marked the beginning of the trenches.  From the cutting we passed into a long tortuous burrow walled and roofed with carefully fitted logs.  The earth floor was covered by a sort of wooden lattice.  The only light entering this tunnel was a faint ray from an occasional narrow slit screened by branches; and beside each of these peep-holes hung a shield-shaped metal shutter to be pushed over it in case of emergency.

The passage wound down the hill, almost doubling on itself, in order to give a view of all the surrounding lines.  Presently the roof became much higher, and we saw on one side a curtained niche about five feet above the floor.  One of the officers pulled the curtain back, and there, on a narrow shelf, a gun between his knees, sat a dragoon, his eyes on a peep-hole.  The curtain was hastily drawn again behind his motionless figure, lest the faint light at his back should betray him.  We passed by several of these helmeted watchers, and now and then we came to a deeper recess in which a mitrailleuse squatted,