d our own men, and went down a steep hill
into Vaux, well outside our line of trenches, and thrust forward as
an outpost in the marsh. German eyes could see me as I walked. At any
moment those little houses about me might have been smashed into rubbish
heaps. But no shells came to disturb the waterfowl among the reeds
around.

And so it was that the life in this place was utterly abnormal, and
while the guns were silent except for long--range fire, an old-fashioned
mode of war--what the adjutant of this little outpost called a
"gentlemanly warfare," prevailed. Officers and men slept within a few
hundred yards of the enemy, and the officers wore their pajamas at
night. When a fight took place it was a chivalrous excursion, such as
Sir Walter Manny would have liked, between thirty or forty men on one
side against somewhat the same number on the other.

Our men used to steal out along the causeway which crossed the marsh--a
pathway about four feet wide, broadening out in the middle, so that a
little redoubt or blockhouse was established there, then across a narrow
drawbridge, then along the path again until they came to the thicket
which screened the German village of Curlu.

It sometimes happened that a party of Germans were creeping forward from
the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in party-colored
clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them invisible
between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then suddenly
contact was made.

Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles, the zip-zip
of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of invisibility.
It was a sharp encounter one night when the Loyal North Lancashires held
the village of Vaux, and our men brought back many German helmets and
other trophies as proofs of victory. Then to bed in the village, and a
good night's rest, as when English knights fought the French, not
far from these fields, as chronicled in the pages of that early war
correspondent, Sir John Froissart.

All was quiet when I went along the causeway and out into the wood,
where the outposts stood listening for any crack of a twig which might
betray a German footstep. I was startled when I came suddenly upon
two men, almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they stood,
motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through the brushwood. If I
had followed the path on which they stood for just a little way I should
have walked