between them--the French and German trenches and the barbed wire
entanglements. At some places the trenches ran close together, a few
hundred feet or a few hundred yards marked their distance apart.
At other times they backed fearfully away from one another with the
gashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping between them. We paused to
rest in our climb at a little shrine by the wayside. A communication
trench slipped deviously up to it, and through this trench were
brought the wounded; for the shrine, a dugout in the hillside, had
been converted into a first aid station. A doctor and two stretcher
bearers and two ambulance men were waiting there. Yet the little
shrine, rather than the trenches that crept up to it, dominated the
scene and the war seemed far away. Occasionally we heard a distant
boom and saw a tan cone of dirt rise in the bottom land among the
trenches, and we felt that some poor creature might be in his death
agony. But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of our party
climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his glasses
toward the German lines. Then the trenches about us suddenly grew
alive. The Frenchmen were waving their hands and running about
excitedly. Major Murphy was a Major--a regular United States Army
major in a regular United States army uniform so grand that compared
with our cheap cotton khaki it looked like a five thousand dollar
outfit. The highest officer near us was a French second-lieutenant,
who had no right to boss a Major! But something had to be done.
So the second lieutenant did it. He called down the Major; showed
him that he was in direct range of the German guns, and made it
clear that a big six-foot American in uniform standing silhouetted
against the sky-line would bring down a whole wagon-load of German
hardware on our part of the line. The fact that the German trenches
were two miles away did not make the situation any less dangerous.
Afterwards we left the shrine and the trenches and went on up the