he factory
were a maze of trenches, redoubts, caves, stairs up and stairs
down, machine-guns, barbed wire, enfilading devices were all ready.
When we climbed to an attic-floor to look at the German positions,
which were not fifty yards away, the Commandant was in a fever till
we came down again, lest the Germans might spy us and shell his
soldiers. He did not so much mind them shelling us, but he objected
to them shelling his men. We came down the damaged stairs in
safety.

A way had been knocked longitudinally through a whole row of
cottages. We went along this--it was a lane of watchful figures--and
then it was whispered to us not to talk, for the Germans might
hear! And we peered into mines and burrowed and crawled. We
disappeared into long subterranean passages and emerged among
a lot of soldiers gaily eating as they stood. Close by were a group of
men practising with hand-grenades made harmless for the
occasion. I followed the Commandant round a corner, and we
gazed at I forget what. "Don't stay here," said the Commandant. I
moved away. A second after I had moved a bullet struck the wall
where I had been standing. The entire atmosphere of the place, with
its imminent sense of danger from an invisible enemy and fierce
expectation of damaging that enemy, brought home to me the
grand essential truth of the front, namely, that the antagonists are
continually at grips, like wrestlers, and straining every muscle to
obtain the slightest advantage. ''Casual'' would be the very last
adjective to apply to those activities.

Once, after a roundabout tour on foot, one of the Staff Captains
ordered an automobile to meet us at the end of a certain road. Part
of this road was exposed to German artillery four or five miles off.
No sooner had the car come down the road than we heard the
fearsome sizzling of an approaching shell. We saw the shell burst
before the sound of the sizzling had ceased. Then came the roar of
the explosion. The shell was a 77-mm. high-explosive. It fell out of
nowhere on the road. The German artillery methodically searched
the exposed portion of the road for about half an hour. The shells
dropped on it or close by it at intervals of two minutes, and they
were planted at even distances of about a hundred yards up and
down the slope. I watched the operation from a dug-out close by. It
was an exact and a rather terrifying operation. It showed that the
invisible Germans were letting nothing whatever go by;