admitted, the great military
qualities of the enemy, they held towards him a more definitely
contemptuous attitude than I could discover elsewhere. "When the
Boches attack us," said one of them, "we drive them back to their
trench, and we take that trench. Thus we advance." But, for them,
there was Boche and Boche. It was the Bavarians whom they most
respected. They deemed the Prussians markedly inferior as fighters
to the Bavarians. The Prussians would not hold firm when seriously
menaced. The Prussians, in a word, would not "stick it." Such was
the unanimous verdict here.

Out beyond the wood, on the hillside, in the communication-
trenches and other trenches, we were enabled to comprehend the
true significance of that phrase uttered so carelessly by newspaper-
readers--Notre Dame de Lorette. The whole of the ground was in
heaps. There was no spot, literally, on which a shell had not burst.
Vegetation was quite at an end. The shells seemed to have
sterilised the earth. There was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of
any sort, not a root. Even the rankest weeds refused to sprout in the
perfect desolation. And this was the incomparable soil of France.
The trenches meandered for miles through the pitted brown slopes,
and nothing could be seen from them but vast encumbrances of
barbed wire. Knotted metal heaped on the unyielding earth!

The solitude of the communication-trenches was appalling, and the
continuous roar of the French seventy-fives over our heads did not
alleviate it. In the other trenches, however, was much humanity,
some of it sleeping in deep, obscure retreats, but most of it acutely
alive and interested in everything. A Captain with a shabby uniform
and a strong Southern accent told us how on March 9th he and his
men defended their trench in water up to the waist and lumps of ice
in it knocking against their bodies.

"I was summoned to surrender," he laughed. "I did not surrender.
We had twenty killed and twenty-four with frostbitten feet as a result
of that affair. Yes--March 9th."

March 9th, 1915, obviously divided that officer's life into two parts,
and not unnaturally!

A little further on we might hear an officer speaking somewhat
ardently into a telephone:

"What are they doing with that gun? They are shooting all over the
shop. Tell them exactly------"

Still a little further on, and another officer would lead us to a spot
where we could get glimpses of the plain. What a plain! Pit-head