down; yet it was hard to ascribe to them any real shape, since they zigzagged so crazily.  I could tell, though, there was sanity in this seeming madness, for nearly every trench was joined at an acute angle with its neighbor; so that a man, or a body of men, starting at the rear, out of danger, might move to the very front of the fighting zone and all the time be well sheltered.  So far as I could make out there were but few breaks in the sequence of communications.  One of these breaks was almost directly in front of me as I stood facing the south.

The batteries of the Allies and their infantry trenches, being so much farther away, were less plainly visible.  I could discern their location without being able to grasp their general arrangement.  Between the nearer infantry trenches of the two opposing forces were tiny dots in the ground, each defined by an infinitesimal hillock of yellow earth heaped before it—­observation pits these, where certain picked men, who do not expect to live very long anyway, hide themselves away to keep tally on the effect of the shells, which go singing past just over their heads to fall among the enemy, who may be only a few hundred feet or a few hundred yards away from the observers.

It was an excessively busy afternoon among the guns.  They spoke continually—­now this battery going, now that; now two or three or a dozen together—­and the sound of them came up to us in claps and roars like summer thunder.  Sometimes, when a battery close by let go, I could watch the thin, shreddy trail of fine smoke that marked the arched flight of a shrapnel bomb, almost from the very mouth of the gun clear to where it burst out into a fluffy white powder puff inside the enemy’s position.

Contrariwise, I could see how shells from the enemy crossed those shells in the air and curved downward to scatter their iron sprays among the Germans.  In the midst of all this would come a sharp, spattering sound, as though hail in the height of the thunder shower had fallen on a tin roof; and that, I learned, meant infantry firing in a trench somewhere.

For a while I watched some German soldiers moving forward through a criss-cross of trenches; I took them to be fresh men going in to relieve other men who had seen a period of service under fire.  At first they suggested moles crawling through plow furrows; then, as they progressed onward, they shrank to the smallness of gray grub-worms, advancing one behind another.  My eye strayed beyond them a fair distance and fell on a row of tiny scarlet dots, like cochineal bugs, showing minutely but clearly against the green-yellow face of a ridgy field well inside the forward batteries of the French and English.  At that same instant the lieutenant must have seen the crawling red line too.  He pointed to it.

“Frenchmen,” he said; “French infantrymen’s trousers.  One cannot make out their coats, but their red trousers show as they wriggle forward on their faces.”