informed us that we were then actually within two
hundred yards of the German trenches, so near, he said, that his men
"knew the Germans in the opposing trenches by their first names."

Seeing a modern battle demolishes all one's preconceived ideas derived
from descriptions of previous wars. One at least expects some sort of
rapid and exciting action. In reality, as we stood in the very midst
of the Battle of the Aisne, there was, in our immediate neighborhood,
only a dead silence. At intervals an angry rumbling would break out
somewhere in the distance, but in the trenches close to our elbows
there was no sound or movement. No birds, no beasts, no men were
anywhere to be seen. This uncanny silence would continue for twenty or
thirty interminable seconds and then a shrapnel would burst close by,
with a sharp, ugly, threatening bang which had no echo; then all
lapsed into silence again. Each shrapnel only made the subsequent
silence more intense, just as a man's footsteps crunching through the
snow-crust of a winter wilderness seem like a brutal intrusion on the
absolute stillness.

We looked behind us and could see no signs of French troops; we peeped
around the house corner and could perceive no indications of the
enemy. It was a monotonous landscape which faded away through the mist
to nothingness, and its only noticeable features were a few shell
craters and two French soldiers sitting close by in the end of a
trench. These men remained motionless so long before one of them moved
that we began to think they were dead. Their comrades were all hidden
in a bomb-proof trench which from any angle was invisible at a
distance of a few yards. Several more officers came out of the house
and chatted with us, or unconcernedly read newspapers which we
distributed and made not the slightest break in their conversation
when a shrapnel burst directly over our heads with ear-splitting
nearness.

The shrapnel arrived without any forewarning scream. This is a sign
that the guns are less than two thousand yards away. For the first one
or two thousand yards of its flight a 3-inch shell travels faster than
sound, but after that distance it so rapidly loses velocity that the
sound of its screech travels faster than the shell and arrives ahead
of it.

* * * * *

We visited the field headquarters of a General, commanding a division
of twenty thousand men, whom we had the pleasure of meeting. Under a
gre