the tunnel the morning of the day it was blown up. The French had
stopped working for fear of being overheard by the Germans. It was a
ticklish situation. Were the Germans aware of the French tunnel? If so,
they would blow up their own at once. Were they still continuing their
labor? The earth of the French might burst apart anyminute and rain down
again in a dreadful shower of clods, stones, and mangled bodies.

Alone, quiet, at the end of the passage under the German lines sat an
old poilu, the sentinel of the tunnel. He was an old coal miner of the
North. The light of a candle showed his quiet, bearded face, grave as
the countenance of some sculptured saint on the portico of a Gothic
church, and revealed the wrinkles and lines of many years of labor. The
sentinel held a microphone to his ears; the poles of it disappearing
into the wall of damp earth separating us from the Boches.

Hippolyte whispered, "You hear them?"

The old man nodded his head, and gave the microphone to his officer. I
saw Hippolyte listen. Then, without a word, he handed it to me. All that
I could hear was a faint tapping.

"The Boches," whispered Hippolyte.

The French blew up the sape early in the afternoon, at a time when they
felt sure the Germans were at work in their tunnel. I saw the result the
next day. A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five feet in diameter,
and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No Man's Land. Even the
stumps of two trees had sunk and tilted.

It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity. I once talked the