looking knives.

For nearly an hour we slipped and stumbled through the endless
cutting. At one spot the parapet, soaked by water, had caved in. In
the breach thus made had been planted a neatly lettered sign. It was
terse and to the point: "The Hun sees you here. Go away." And we did.
The trench had gradually been growing narrower and shallower and more
tortuous until we were walking half doubled over so as not to show our
heads above the top. At last it came to an end in a sort of cellar,
perhaps six feet square, which had been burrowed from the ridge of a
hill. The entrance to the observatory, for that is what it was, had
been carefully screened by a burlap curtain; within, a telescope,
mounted on a tripod, applied its large and inquisitive eye to a small
aperture, likewise curtained, cut in the opposite wall. We were in the
advanced observation post on the slopes of Notre Dame de Lorette, less
than a thousand yards from the enemy. At the foot of the spur on which
we stood ran the British trenches and, a few hundred yards beyond
them, the German. From our vantage-point we could see the two lines,
looking like monstrous brown snakes, extending for miles across the
plain. Perhaps a mile behind the German trenches was a patch of
red-brown roofs. It was the town of Lieven, a straggling suburb of
Lens, famous as the centre of the mine-fields of Northern France.

The only occupants of the observation post were a youthful Canadian
lieutenant and a sergeant of the "Buzzers," as they call the Signal
Corps. The officer was from Montreal and he instantly became my friend
when I spoke of golf at Dixie and rides in the woods back of Mount
Royal and a certain cocktail which they make with great perfection in
a certain club that we both knew. He adjusted the telescope and I put
my eye to it, whereupon the streets of the distant town sprang into
life before me. In front of a cottage a woman was hanging out
washing--I could even make out the colors of the garments; a gray
motor whirled into a square, stopped, a man alighted, and it went on
again; a group of men--German soldiers doubtless--strolled across my
field of vision and one of them paused for a moment as though to light
a pipe; along a street straggled a line of children, evidently coming
from school, for it must be remembered that in most of these French
towns occupied by the Germans, even those close behind the lines, the
civilian life goes on much as usual. Though the Alli