ched
flight of a shrapnel bomb, almost from the very mouth of the gun clear
to where it burst out into a fluffy white powder puff inside the enemy's
position.

Contrariwise, I could see how shells from the enemy crossed those shells
in the air and curved downward to scatter their iron sprays among the
Germans. In the midst of all this would come a sharp, spattering sound,
as though hail in the height of the thunder shower had fallen on a tin
roof; and that, I learned, meant infantry firing in a trench somewhere.

For a while I watched some German soldiers moving forward through a
criss-cross of trenches; I took them to be fresh men going in to relieve
other men who had seen a period of service under fire. At first they
suggested moles crawling through plow furrows; then, as they progressed
onward, they shrank to the smallness of gray grub-worms, advancing one
behind another. My eye strayed beyond them a fair distance and fell on
a row of tiny scarlet dots, like cochineal bugs, showing minutely but
clearly against the green-yellow face of a ridgy field well inside the
forward batteries of the French and English. At that same instant the
lieutenant must have seen the crawling red line too. He pointed to it.

"Frenchmen," he said; "French infantrymen's trousers. One cannot make
out their coats, but their red trousers show as they wriggle forward on
their faces."

Better than ever before I realized the idiocy of sending men to fight in
garments that make vivid targets of them.

My companion may have come up for pleasure, but if business obtruded
itself on him he did not neglect it. He bent to his telephone and spoke
briskly into it. He used German, but, after a fashion, I made out what
he said. He was directing the attention of somebody to the activities
of those red trousers.

I intended to see what would follow on this, but at this precise moment
a sufficiently interesting occurrence came to pass at a place within
much clearer eye range. The gray grub-worms had shoved ahead until they
were gray ants; and now all the ants concentrated into a swarm and,
leaving the trenches, began to move in a slanting direction toward a
patch of woods far over to our left. Some of them, I think, got there,
some of them did not. Certain puff-balls of white smoke, and one big
smudge of black smoke, which last signified a bomb of high explosives,
broke over them and among them, hiding all from sight for a space of
seconds.