keeping awake, apparently, and letting the men in the opposite trenches
know you are awake, the afternoon was peaceful. Pink-cheeked youngsters
in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped their hands to their sides as
officers came in sight, heard English with an amazement not difficult to
imagine, and doubtless were as anxious to talk to these strange beings
from a world they'd said good-by to, as we were to talk to them.

At one of the salient angles, where a platform had been cut, we stopped
to look through a periscope: one cannot show head or hand above the
trench, of course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this curious
shut-in world as men do in a submarine--just as the lady in the
old-fashioned house across from us in New York sits at her front window
and sees in a slanting mirror everything that happens between her and
the Avenue.

We had not been told just where we were going (in that shut-in ditch one
had no idea), and there in the mirror, beyond some straggling barbed
wire and perhaps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another clay
bank--the trenches of the enemy! Highlanders, Gurkhas, Heaven knows
what--you could see nothing--but--over there was England!

So this was what these young soldiers had come to--here was the real
thing. Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the
regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or
sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station--and you should
see these German women marching out with their men!--you go marching out
to war. You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then
they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a
stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which
is your enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and