A little sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its chemical yellow look more foul.  A detachment of men moved out on a road which ran toward the French trenches, and then vanished at the foot of a little rise.  Other men appeared moving toward us with that concentration of purpose and bearing shown in both Armies when—­dinner is at hand.  They looked like people who had been digging hard.

“The same work.  Always the same work!” the officer said.  “And you could walk from here to the sea or to Switzerland in that ditch—­and you’ll find the same work going on everywhere.  It isn’t war.”

“It’s better than that,” said another.  “It’s the eating-up of a people.  They come and they fill the trenches and they die, and they die; and they send more and those die.  We do the same, of course, but—­look!”

He pointed to the large deliberate smoke-heads renewing themselves along that yellowed beach.  “That is the frontier of civilization.  They have all civilization against them —­those brutes yonder.  It’s not the local victories of the old wars that we’re after.  It’s the barbarian—­all the barbarian.  Now, you’ve seen the whole thing in little.  Come and look at our children.”

SOLDIERS IN CAVES

We left that tall tree whose fruits are death ripened and distributed at the tingle of small bells.  The observer returned to his maps and calculations; the telephone-boy stiffened up beside his exchange as the amateurs went out of his life.  Some one called down through the branches to ask who was attending to—­Belial, let us say, for I could not catch the gun’s name.  It seemed to belong to that terrific new voice which had lifted itself for the second or third time.  It appeared from the reply that if Belial talked too long he would be dealt with from another point miles away.

The troops we came down to see were at rest in a chain of caves which had begun life as quarries and had been fitted up by the army for its own uses.  There were underground corridors, ante-chambers, rotundas, and ventilating shafts with a bewildering play of cross lights, so that wherever you looked you saw Goya’s pictures of men-at-arms.

Every soldier has some of the old maid in him, and rejoices in all the gadgets and devices of his own invention.  Death and wounding come by nature, but to lie dry, sleep soft, and keep yourself clean by forethought and contrivance is art, and in all things the Frenchman is gloriously an artist.

Moreover, the French officers seem as mother-keen on their men as their men are brother-fond of them.  Maybe the possessive form of address:  “Mon general,” “mon capitaine,” helps the idea, which our men cloke in other and curter phrases.  And those soldiers, like ours, had been welded for months in one furnace.  As an officer said:  “Half our orders now need not be given.  Experience makes us think together.”  I believe, too, that if a French private has an idea—­and they are full of ideas—­it reaches his C. 0. quicker than it does with us.