sed by a rough cart-track. Along
this track in the hot sunshine little French soldiers, the size of
tin toys, were scrambling up with bags and loads of faggots, their
ant-like activity as orderly and untroubled as if the two armies had
not lain trench to trench a few yards away. It was one of those
strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the
bewildered looker-on the utter impossibility of picturing how the
thing _really happens._

While we stood watching we heard the sudden scream of a battery
close above us. The crest of the hill we were climbing was alive
with "Seventy-fives," and the piercing noise seemed to burst out at
our very backs. It was the most terrible war-shriek I had heard: a
kind of wolfish baying that called up an image of all the dogs of
war simultaneously tugging at their leashes. There is a dreadful
majesty in the sound of a distant cannonade; but these yelps and
hisses roused only thoughts of horror. And there, on the opposite
slope, the black and brown geysers were beginning to spout up from
the German trenches; and from the batteries above them came the puff
and roar of retaliation. Below us, along the cart-track, the little
French soldiers continued to scramble up peacefully to the
dilapidated village; and presently a group of officers of dragoons,
emerging from the wood, came down to welcome us to their
Head-quarters.

We continued to climb through the forest, the cannonade still
whistling overhead, till we reached the most elaborate trapper
colony we had yet seen. Half underground, walled with logs, and
deeply roofed by sods tufted with ferns and moss, the cabins were
scattered under the trees and connected with each other by paths
bordered with white stones. Before the Colonel's cabin the soldiers
had made a banked-up flower-bed sown with annuals; and farther up
the slope stood a log chapel, a mere gable with a wooden altar under
it, all tapestried with ivy and holly. Near by was the chaplain's
subterranean dwelling. It was reached by a deep cutting with
ivy-covered sides, and ivy and fir-boughs masked the front. This
sylvan retreat had just been completed, and the officers, the
chaplain, and the soldiers loitering near by, were all equally eager
to have it seen and hear it praised.

The commanding officer, having done the honours of the camp, led us
about a quarter of a mile down the hillside to an open cutting which
marked the beginning of the trenches. From the cuttin