nd Germany--you take the hint. The
flare sank into earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling
of sparks in our faces.

"What if we had been seen?"

"They'd have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they
might have got us."

"It's hard to believe," I said.

So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard
to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until
after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching
enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus
of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating
on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute,
painstaking economy of war.

We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought
up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire
instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to
shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke
to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that
they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was
out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on
the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine.
We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by
any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and
overheard by us.

Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was
war. You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising
your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our
backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the
talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides,
like that around some camp-fire on the plains.

It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that you might have
crawled on up to the Germans and said, "Howdy!" But by the time
you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could
present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of
holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for
which the Germans were looking. "Well, shall we go back?" asked the
officer. There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night
prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog's.
Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel
as the result