th in which they
live.

They lived in a world which is as different from this known world of
ours as though they belonged to another race of men inhabiting
another planet, or to an old race far back behind the memory of the
first civilization. For in this district of Champagne, the soldiers of
France were earth-men or troglodytes, not only in the trenches, but
for miles behind the trenches. When the rains came last autumn they
were without shelter, and there were few villages on this lonely stretch
of country in which to billet them. But here were soft, chalky ridges
and slopes in which it was not difficult to dig holes and caverns. The
troops took to picks and shovels, and very soon they built habitations
for themselves in which they have been living ever since when not in
the trenches.

I was invited into some of these subterranean parlours, and ducked
my head as I went down clay steps into dim caves where three or
four men lived in close comradeship in each of them. They had
tacked the photographs of their wives or sweethearts on the walls, to
make these places "homelike," and there was space in some of them
for wood fires, which burned with glowing embers and a smoke that
made my eyes smart, so that by the light of them these soldiers
would see the portraits of those who wait for them to come back, who
have waited so patiently and so long through the dreary months.

But now that spring had come the earth-men had emerged from their
holes to bask in the sun again, and with that love of beauty which is
instinctive in a Frenchman's heart, they were planting gardens and
shrubberies outside their chalk dwellings with allegorical designs in
cockle-shells or white stones.

"Tres chic!" said the commandant to a group of soldiers proud to their
handicraft.

And chic also, though touching in its sentiment, was a little graveyard
behind a fringe of branches which mask a French battery. The
gunners were still at work plugging out shells over the enemy's lines,
from which came answering shells with the challenge of death, but
they had found time to decorate the graves of the comrades who had
been "unfortunate." They had twined wild flowers about the wooden
crosses and made borders of blossom about those mounds of earth.
It was the most beautiful cemetery in which I have ever stood with
bared head. Death was busy not far away. Great guns were speaking
in deep, reverberating tones, which gave a solemn import to the day;
but