CHAPTER IX

FIRST SIGHT OF THE TANKS


Late in the summer I accumulated a nice little case of trench
fever.

This disease is due to remaining for long periods in the wet and
mud, to racked nerves, and, I am inclined to think, to sleeping
in the foul air of the dug-outs. The chief symptom is high
temperature, and the patient aches a good deal. I was sent back to
a place in the neighborhood of Arras and was there a week
recuperating.

While I was there a woman spy whom I had known in Abalaine was
brought to the village and shot. The frequency with which the duck
walk at Abalaine had been shelled, especially when ration parties
or troops were going over it, had attracted a good deal of
attention.

There was a single house not far from the end of that duck walk
west of Abalaine, occupied by a woman and two or three children.
She had lived there for years and was, so far as anybody knew, a
Frenchwoman in breeding and sympathies. She was in the habit of
selling coffee to the soldiers, and, of course, gossiped with them
and thus gained a good deal of information about troop movements.