May 16th.
About two miles from the German frontier (_frontier_ just here as
well as front) an isolated hill rises out of the Lorraine meadows.
East of it, a ribbon of river winds among poplars, and that ribbon
is the boundary between Empire and Republic. On such a clear day as
this the view from the hill is extraordinarily interesting. From its
grassy top a little aeroplane cannon stares to heaven, watching the
east for the danger speck; and the circumference of the hill is
furrowed by a deep trench--a "bowel," rather--winding invisibly from
one subterranean observation post to another. In each of these
earthly warrens (ingeniously wattled, roofed and iron-sheeted) stand
two or three artillery officers with keen quiet faces, directing by
telephone the fire of batteries nestling somewhere in the woods four
or five miles away. Interesting as the place was, the men who lived
there interested me far more. They obviously belonged to different
classes, and had received a different social education; but their
mental and moral fraternity was complete. They were all fairly
young, and their faces had the look that war has given to French
faces: a look of sharpened intelligence, strengthened will and
sobered judgment, as if every faculty, trebly vivified, were so bent
on the one end that personal problems had been pushed back to the
vanishing point of the great perspective.
From this vigilant height--one of the intentest eyes open on the
frontier--we went a short distance down the hillside to a village
out of range of the guns, where the commanding officer gave us tea
in a charming old house with a terraced garden full of flowers and
puppies. Below the terrace, lost Lorraine stretched away to her blue
heights, a vision of summer peace: and just above us the unsleeping
hill kept watch, its signal-wires trembling night and day. It was
one of the intervals of rest and sweetness when the whole horrible
black business seems to press most intolerably on the nerves.
Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed a
dark blur in our bird's-eye view of the plain. We passed into the
forest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts. On
all sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branched
and sodded and leafy that they seemed like some transition form
between tree and house. We were in one of the so-called "villages
negres" of the second-line trenches, the jolly little settlements to
which the troops retire after doing their shift under fire. This
particular colony has been developed to an extreme degree of comfort
and safety. The houses are partly underground, connected by deep
winding "bowels" over which light rustic bridges have been thrown,
and so profoundly roofed with sods that as much of them as shows
above ground is shell-proof. Yet they are real houses, with real
doors and windows under their grass-eaves, real furniture inside,
and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors. In the
Colonel's bungalow a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on the
table, and everywhere we saw the same neatness and order, the same
amused pride in the look of things. The men were dining at long
trestle-tables under the trees; tired, unshaven men in shabby
uniforms of all cuts and almost every colour. They were off duty,
relaxed, in a good humour; but every face had the look of the faces
watching on the hill-top. Wherever I go among these men of the front
I have the same impression: the impression that the absorbing
undivided thought of the Defense of France lives in the heart and
brain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain of
their chief.
We walked a dozen yards down the road and came to the edge of the
forest. A wattled palisade bounded it, and through a gap in the
palisade we looked out across a field to the roofs of a quiet
village a mile away. I went out a few steps into the field and was
abruptly pulled back. "Take care--those are the trenches!" What
looked like a ridge thrown up by a plough was the enemy's line; and
in the quiet village French cannon watched. Suddenly, as we stood
there, they woke, and at the same moment we heard the unmistakable
Gr-r-r of an aeroplane and saw a Bird of Evil high up against the
blue. Snap, snap, snap barked the mitrailleuse on the hill, the
soldiers jumped from their wine and strained their eyes through the
trees, and the Taube, finding itself the centre of so much
attention, turned grey tail and swished away to the concealing
clouds.
