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.

"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