hrough the trees
towards the outer bastions I heard the splintering of wood not far
away.

But the soldiers near me seemed quite unconscious of any peril
overhead. Some of them were gardening and making little bowers
about their huts. Only a few sentinels were at their posts, along the
bastions built of logs and clay, behind a fringe of brushwood which
screened them from the first line of German trenches outside this
boundary of the wood.

"Don't show your head round that corner," said an officer, touching
me on the sleeve, as I caught a glimpse of bare fields and, a
thousand yards away, a red-roofed house. There was nothing much
to see--although the enemies of France were there with watchful eyes
for any movement behind our screen.

"A second is long enough for a shot in the forehead," said the officer,
"and if I were you I would take that other path. The screen has worn a
bit thin just there."

It was curious. I found it absolutely impossible to realize, without an
intellectual effort, that out of the silence of those flat fields death
would come instantly if I showed my head. But I did not try the
experiment to settle all doubts.

23

In the heart of the wood was a small house, spared by some freak of
chance by the German shells which came dropping on every side of
it. Here I took tea with the officers, who used it as their headquarters,
and never did tea taste better than on that warm spring day, though it
was served with a ladle out of a tin bowl to the music of many guns.
The officers were a cheery set who had become quite accustomed to
the menace of death which at any moment might shatter this place
and make a wreckage of its peasant furniture. The colonel sat back in
a wooden armchair, asking for news about the outer world as though
he were a shipwrecked mariner on a desert isle; but every now and
then he would listen to the sound of the shells and say, "Depart! ...
Arrive!" just like the officer who had walked with me through the
wood.

Two of the younger officers sat on the edge of a truckle-bed beneath
the portrait of a buxom peasant woman, who was obviously the wife
of the late proprietor. Two other officers lounged against the door-
posts, entertaining the guests of the day with droll stories of death.
Another came in with the latest communique received by the wireless
station outside, and there was a "Bravo! bravo!" from all of us
because it had been a good day for France. They were simple