and they moved, very slowly it would seem, toward the
crosswise trench on ahead a bit. To reach it they had to cross a
sloping green patch of cleared land. So far as I might tell no
explosive or shrapnel shower fell into them or near them, but when they
had gone perhaps a third of the distance across the green patch there
was a quick scatteration of their inch-high figures. Quite distinctly I
counted three manikins who instantly fell down flat and two others who
went ahead a little way deliberately, and then lay down. The rest
darted back to the cover which they had just quit and jumped in briskly.
The five figures remained where they had dropped and became quiet.
Anyway, I could detect no motion in them. They were just little gray
strips. Into my mind on the moment came incongruously a memory of what
I had seen a thousand times in the composing room of a country newspaper
where the type was set by hand. I thought of five pica plugs lying on
the printshop floor.

It was hard for me to make myself believe that I had seen human beings
killed and wounded. I can hardly believe it yet--that those
insignificant toy-figures were really and truly men. I watched through
the glass after that for possibly twenty minutes, until the summons came
for lunch, but no more of the German dolls ventured out of their make-
believe defenses to be blown flat by an invisible blast.

It was a picnic lunch served on board trestles under a tree behind the
cover of a straw-roofed shelter tent, and we ate it in quite a peaceful
and cozy picnic fashion. Twice during the meal an orderly came with a
message which he had taken off a field telephone in a little pigsty of
logs and straw fifty feet away from us; but the general each time merely
canted his head to hear what the whispered word might be and went on
eating. There was no clattering in of couriers, no hurried dispatching
of orders this way and that. Only, just before we finished with the
meal, he got up and walked away a few paces, and there two of his aides
joined him and the three of them confabbed together earnestly for a
couple of minutes or so. While so engaged they had the air about them
of surgeons preparing to undertake an operation and first consulting
over the preliminary details. Or perhaps it would be truer to say they
looked like civil engineers discussing the working-out of an undertaking
regarding which there was interest but no uneasiness. Assuredly they
behaved n