Below the village the road wound down to a forest that had formed a
dark blur in our bird's-eye view of the plain. We passed into the
forest and halted on the edge of a colony of queer exotic huts. On
all sides they peeped through the branches, themselves so branched
and sodded and leafy that they seemed like some transition form
between tree and house. We were in one of the so-called "villages
negres" of the second-line trenches, the jolly little settlements to
which the troops retire after doing their shift under fire. This
particular colony has been developed to an extreme degree of comfort
and safety. The houses are partly underground, connected by deep
winding "bowels" over which light rustic bridges have been thrown,
and so profoundly roofed with sods that as much of them as shows
above ground is shell-proof. Yet they are real houses, with real
doors and windows under their grass-eaves, real furniture inside,
and real beds of daisies and pansies at their doors. In the
Colonel's bungalow a big bunch of spring flowers bloomed on the
table, and everywhere we saw the same neatness and order, the same
amused pride in the look of things. The men were dining at long
trestle-tables under the trees; tired, unshaven men in shabby
uniforms of all cuts and almost every colour. They were off duty,
relaxed, in a good humour; but every face had the look of the faces
watching on the hill-top. Wherever I go among these men of the front
I have the same impression: the impression that the absorbing
undivided thought of the Defense of France lives in the heart and
brain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain of
their chief.

We walked a dozen yards down the road and came to the edge of the
forest. A wattled palisade bounded it, and through a gap in the
palisade we looked out across a field to the roofs of a quiet