ugh any crack. No
footstep, save our own, told of life. The darkness was almost palpable.
It seemed to press against one's eyeballs like a velvet mask. My nerves
were so on edge with a sense of the uncanny silence and invisibility
that I started violently at the sound of a quiet voice speaking three
inches from my ear.

"Halte! Qui va la?"

It was a French sentry, who stood with his back to the wall of a house
in such a gulf of blackness that not even his bayonet was revealed by a
glint.

Another day of war came. The old beauty of the world was there, close
to the lines of the bronzed cornfields splashed with the scarlet of
poppies, and the pale yellow of the newly cut sheaves, stretching away
and away, without the break of a hedge, to the last slopes which met the
sky.

I stood in some of those harvest-fields, staring across to a slope of
rising ground where there was no ripening wheat, and where the grass
itself came to a sudden halt, as though afraid of something. I knew the
reason of this, and of the long white lines of earth thrown up for miles
each way. Those were the parapets of German trenches, and in the ditches
below them were earth-men, armed with deadly weapons, staring out across
the beauty of France and wondering, perhaps, why they should be there
to mar it, and watching me, a little black dot in their range of vision,
with an idle thought as to whether it were worth their while to let a
bullet loose and end my walk. They could have done so easily, but did
not bother. No shot or shell came to break through the hum of bees or
to crash through the sigh of the wind, which was bending all the ears of
corn to listen to the murmurous insect-life in these fields of France.

Close to me was a group of peasants--a study for a painter like Millet.
One of them shouted out to me, "Voila les Boches!" waving his arm to
left and right, and then shaking a clenched fist at them.

A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an open bodice munched
an apple, like Audrey in "As You Like It," and between her bites told
me that she had had a brother killed in the war, and that she had been
nearly killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came bursting all
round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed to great holes
in the field), and described the coming of the Germans into her village
over there, when she had lied to some Uhlans about the whereabouts of
French soldiers and had given one of those fat Germa