officer pass, and turned his head with a little sign of
understanding.

"Do you want to look down?"

He moved a step away from his window. The look-out projected over
the ravine, raking its depths; and here, with one's eye to the
leaf-lashed hole, one saw at last ... saw, at the bottom of the
harmless glen, half way between cliff and cliff, a grey uniform
huddled in a dead heap. "He's been there for days: they can't fetch
him away," said the watcher, regluing his eye to the hole; and it
was almost a relief to find it was after all a tangible enemy hidden
over there across the meadow...

The sun had set when we got back to our starting-point in the
underground village. The chasseurs-a-pied were lounging along
the roadside and standing in gossiping groups about the motor. It
was long since they had seen faces from the other life, the life
they had left nearly a year earlier and had not been allowed to go
back to for a day; and under all their jokes and good-humour their
farewell had a tinge of wistfulness. But one felt that this fugitive
reminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like a
dream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality: the
business of holding their bit of France.

It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier's
single-mindedness is so strong in all who have had even a glimpse of
the front; perhaps it is gathered less from what the men say than
from the look in their eyes. Even while they are accepting
cigarettes and exchanging trench-jokes, the look is there; and when