s
one gruel of smashed trees, split stones, and powdered soil.
It might have been a rag-picker's dump-heap on a colossal
scale.

Alan looked at it critically. I think he had helped to make
it not long before.

"We're on the top of the hill now, and the Boches are below
us," said he. "We gave them a very fair sickener lately."

"This," said the Colonel, "is the front line."

There were overhead guards against hand-bombs which disposed
me to believe him, but what convinced me most was a corporal
urging us in whispers not to talk so loud. The men were at
dinner, and a good smell of food filled the trench. This was
the first smell I had encountered in my long travels uphill--a
mixed, entirely wholesome flavour of stew, leather, earth, and
rifle-oil.

FRONT LINE PROFESSIONALS

A proportion of men were standing to arms while others ate;
but dinner-time is slack time, even among animals, and it was
close on noon.

"The Boches got _their_ soup a few days ago," some one
whispered. I thought of the pulverized hillside, and hoped it
had been hot enough.

We edged along the still trench, where the soldiers stared,
with justified contempt, I thought, upon the civilian who
scuttled through their life for a few emotional minutes in
order to make words out of their blood. Somehow it reminded
me of coming in late to a play and incommoding a long line of
packed stalls. The whispered dialogue was much the same:
"Pardon!" "I beg your pardon, monsieur." "To the right,
monsieur." "If monsieur will lower his head." "One sees best
from here, monsieur," and so on. It was their day and
night-long business, carried through without display or heat, or
doubt or indecision. Those who worked, worked; those off duty,
not five feet behind them in the dug-outs, were deep in their
papers, or their meals or their letters; while death stood ready
at every minute to drop down into the narrow cut from out of the
narrow strip of unconcerned sky. And for the better part of a
week one had skirted hundreds of miles of such a frieze!

The loopholes not in use were plugged rather like
old-fashioned hives. Said the Colonel, removing a plug:
"Here are the Boches. Look, and you'll see their sandbags."
Through the jumble of riven trees and stones one saw what
might have been a bit of green sacking. "They're about seven
metres distant just here," the Colonel went on. That was
true, too. We entered a little fortalice with a cannon in