ns a blow on the
face when he had tried to make love to her in her father's barn. Her
mother had been raped.

In further fields out of view of the German trenches, but well within
shell-range, the harvesting was being done by French soldiers. One of
them was driving the reaping--machine and looked like a gunner on his
limber, with his kepi thrust to the back of his head. The trousers of
his comrades were as red as the poppies that grew on the edge of the
wheat, and three of these poilus had ceased their work to drink out of a
leather wine-bottle which had been replenished from a hand-cart. It was
a pretty scene if one could forget the grim purpose which had put those
harvesters in uniform.

The same thought was in the mind of a British officer.

"A beautiful country, this," he said. "It's a pity to cut it up with
trenches and barbed wire."

Battalions of New Army men were being reviewed but a furlong or two away
from that Invisible Man who was wielding a scythe which had no mercy
for unripe wheat. Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage of men's
souls, not shirking the next ordeal.

It was through red ears of corn, in that summer of '15, that one found
one's way to many of the trenches that marked the boundary-lines of the
year's harvesting, and in Belgium (by Kemmel Hill) the shells of our
batteries, answered by German guns, came with their long-drawn howls of
murder across the heads of peasant women who were gleaning, with bent
backs.

In Plug Street Wood the trees had worn thin under showers of shrapnel,
but the long avenues between the trenches were cool and pleasant in the
heat of the day. It was one of the elementary schools where many of our
soldiers learned the A B C of actual warfare after their training in
camps behind the lines. Here one might sport with Amaryllis in the
shade, but for the fact that country wenches were not allowed in the
dugouts and trenches, where I found our soldiers killing flies in the
intervals between pot-shots at German periscopes.

The enemy was engaged, presumably, in the same pursuit of killing time
and life (with luck), and sniping was hot on both sides, so that the
wood resounded with sharp reports as though hard filbert nuts were being
cracked by giant teeth. Each time I went there one of our men was hit by
a sniper, and his body was carried off for burial as I went toward the
first line of trenches, hoping that my shadow would not fall across
a German periscope.