"We've talked enough now," said John, "and I'll see that food is sent
you. Then it's off with you to the hospital. It's a French hospital, but
they'll treat a German shoulder just as they would one of their own."

The life in the vast honeycomb of trenches was awakening fast. Two
million men perhaps, devoted to the task of killing one another, crept
from their burrows and stood up. Along the whole line almost of twenty
score miles snow had fallen, but the rifles and cannon were firing
already, spasmodic sharpshooting at some points, and fierce little
battles at others.

John peered over the edge of the trench. A man was allowed to put his
head in the German range but not his hand. So long as he lived he must
preserve a hand which could pull the trigger or wield the bayonet.

They were not firing in the immediate front, and he had a good view of
fields and low hills, deep in snow. Just before him the ground was
leveled, and he saw many raised places in the snow there. He knew that
bodies lay beneath, and once more he shuddered violently. But the world
was full of beauty that morning. The sun was a vast sheet of gold,
giving a luminous tint to the snow, and two clusters of trees, covered
to the last bough and twig with snow, were a delicate tracery of white,
shot at times by the sun with a pale yellow glow like that of a rose. On
the horizon a faint misty smoke, the color of silver, was rising, and he
knew that it came from the cooking fires of the Germans.

It reminded him that he was very hungry. Cave life under fire, if it did
not kill a man, gave him a ferocious appetite, and turning into one of
the transverse trenches he followed a stream of the Strangers who were
already on the way to their hotel.