Except for an occasional far-off detonation and the more or less constant and, so to speak, absent-minded cracking of rifles, a mere keeping awake, apparently, and letting the men in the opposite trenches know you are awake, the afternoon was peaceful.  Pink-cheeked youngsters in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped their hands to their sides as officers came in sight, heard English with an amazement not difficult to imagine, and doubtless were as anxious to talk to these strange beings from a world they’d said good-by to, as we were to talk to them.

At one of the salient angles, where a platform had been cut, we stopped to look through a periscope:  one cannot show head or hand above the trench, of course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this curious shut-in world as men do in a submarine—­just as the lady in the old-fashioned house across from us in New York sits at her front window and sees in a slanting mirror everything that happens between her and the Avenue.

We had not been told just where we were going (in that shut-in ditch one had no idea), and there in the mirror, beyond some straggling barbed wire and perhaps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another clay bank—­the trenches of the enemy!  Highlanders, Gurkhas, Heaven knows what—­you could see nothing—­but—­over there was England!

So this was what these young soldiers had come to—­here was the real thing.  Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the regiment’s head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station—­and you should see these German women marching out with their men!—­you go marching out to war.  You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which is your enemy.  And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and run forward until you are cut down.  And when you have, so to speak, been thrown in the stream for the others to cross over, and the trench is taken, and you are put out of the way under a few inches of French earth, then, perhaps, inasmuch as experience shows that it isn’t worth while to try to keep a trench unless you have captured more than three hundred yards of it, the battalion retires and starts all over again.

We had walked on down the trenches, turned a bend where two trees had been blown up and flung across it, when there was a dull report near by, followed a moment later by a tremendous explosion out toward the enemy’s trench.  “Unsere Minen!” ("One of our bombs!”) laughed a young soldier beside me, and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench.  These bombs were cylinders, about the size of two baking-powder tins joined together, filled with dynamite and exploded by a fuse.  They were thrown from a small mortar with a light charge of powder, just sufficient to toss them over into the opposite trench.  The Germans knew what was coming, and they were laughing and watching in the direction of the English trenches.