“Vorsicht!  Vorsicht!”

There was a dull report and at the same moment something shot up from the English trenches and, very clear against the western sky, came flopping over and over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn.

“Vorsicht!  Vorsicht!” It sailed over our heads behind the trench, there was an instant’s silence, and then “Whong!” and a pile of dirt and black smoke was flung in the air.  Again there was a dull report, and we sent a second back—­this time behind their trench—­and again—­“Vorsicht!  Vorsicht!”—­they sent an answer back.  Four times this was repeated.  A quainter way of making war it would be hard to imagine.  They might have been boys playing “anty-over” over the old house at home.

Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power.  If thrown in the open they go off on the surface much like a gigantic firecracker.  They are easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at night as part of a general bombardment, including shrapnel and heavy explosive shells, or exploding directly in the trench, they must be decidedly unpleasant.

The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and myself waiting on one side of the bend in the trench toward which the bombs were thrown, the others going ahead.  It was several minutes before I rejoined them, and I did not learn until we were outside that they had been taken to another periscope through which they saw a space covered with English dead.  There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack which had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle.  Several Englishmen had got clear into the German trench before they were killed.  Here was another example of the curious localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could pass within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not know even that it was there.

By another communication trench we returned to the little house.  The sun was low by this time and the line of figures walking down the-road toward the automobiles in its full light.  Perhaps the glasses of some British lookout picked us up—­at any rate the whisper of bullets became uncomfortably frequent and near, and we had just got to the motors when —­Tssee—­ee—­rr...  Bong! a shell crashed into the church of La Bassee, only three hundred yards in front of us.

Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower trajectory, it seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to the first motor that it threw mud into it.  Apparently we were both observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up and down which troops and munitions pass, is perfectly known, there was a rather uncomfortable few minutes ere we had whirled through La Bassee, with the women watching from their doors—­no racing motors for them to run away in!—­and down the tree-arched road to ordinary life again.