days or weeks of this service, back clear out of the zone of fire; fresh
men come up to take their places, and so on. All you see as you whirl
through is a sentry here, a soldier's head there at a second-story
window, a company shuffling along a country road.

Women watched us from the doors of La Bassée--still going on living
here, somehow, as human beings will on the volcano's very edge--and
children were playing in the street. Husbands gone, food gone, the
country swept bare--why did they not go, too? But where? Here, at any
rate, there was a roof overhead--until a shell smashed it--and food
soldiers were glad to share. There must be strange stories to tell of
these little islands on the edge of the battle, where the soldiers who
are going out to be killed, and the women whose husbands, perhaps, are
going to help kill them, huddle together for a time, victims of a common
storm.

We whirled past them down the road a bit, then walked up a gentle slope
to the right. Over this low ridge, from the English trenches,
rifle-bullets whistled above our heads. In the shelter of a brick
farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench
service, to go back to La Bassée. They were smallish, mild-looking men,
dusted with the yellow clay in which they had burrowed--clothes, boots,
faces, and hands---until they looked like millers.

"How are the English?" some one asked. "Do they know how to shoot?"
A weary sort of hoot chorused out from the dust-covered men.

"Gut genug!" they said. The house was strewn with rusty cartridge clips
and smashed brick. We waited while our chaperon brought the battalion
commander--a mild-faced little man, more like a school-teacher than a