There was a specimen tree--a tree worthy of such a park--the
sort of tree visitors are always taken to admire. A ladder
ran up it to a platform. What little wind there was swayed
the tall top, and the ladder creaked like a ship's gangway. A
telephone bell tinkled 50 foot overhead. Two invisible guns
spoke fervently for half a minute, and broke off like terriers
choked on a leash. We climbed till the topmost platform
swayed sicklily beneath us. Here one found a rustic shelter,
always of the tea-garden pattern, a table, a map, and a little
window wreathed with living branches that gave one the first
view of the Devil and all his works. It was a stretch of open
country, with a few sticks like old tooth-brushes which had
once been trees round a farm. The rest was yellow grass,
barren to all appearance as the veldt.
"The grass is yellow because they have used gas here," said an
officer. "Their trenches are------. You can see for
yourself."
The guns in the woods began again. They seemed to have no
relation to the regularly spaced bursts of smoke along a
little smear in the desert earth two thousand yards away--no
connection at all with the strong voices overhead coming and
going. It was as impersonal as the drive of the sea along a
breakwater.
Thus it went: a pause--a gathering of sound like the race of
an incoming wave; then the high-flung heads of breakers
spouting white up the face of a groyne. Suddenly, a seventh
wave broke and spread the shape of its foam like a plume
overtopping all the others.
"That's one of our torpilleurs--what you call
trench-sweepers," said the observer among the whispering leaves.
Some one crossed the platform to consult the map with its
ranges. A blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a little
beyond the large plume. It was as though the tide had struck
a reef out yonder.
Then a new voice of tremendous volume lifted itself out of a
lull that followed. Somebody laughed. Evidently the voice
was known.
"That is not for us," a gunner said. "They are being waked up
from------" he named a distant French position. "So and so is
attending to them there. We go on with our usual work. Look!
Another torpilleur."
"THE BARBARIAN"
Again a big plume rose; and again the lighter shells broke at
their appointed distance beyond it. The smoke died away on
that stretch of trench, as the foam of a swell dies in the
angle of a harbour wall, and broke out afresh half a mile
lower down. In its apparent laziness, in its awful
deliberation, and its quick spasms of wrath, it was more like
the work of waves than of men; and our high platform's gentle
sway and glide was exactly the motion of a ship drifting with
us toward that shore.
"The usual work. Only the usual work," the officer explained.
"Sometimes it is here. Sometimes above or below us. I have
been here since May."
A little sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its
chemical yellow look more foul. A detachment of men moved out
on a road which ran toward the French trenches, and then
vanished at the foot of a little rise. Other men appeared
moving toward us with that concentration of purpose and
bearing shown in both Armies when--dinner is at hand. They
looked like people who had been digging hard.
"The same work. Always the same work!" the officer said.
"And you could walk from here to the sea or to Switzerland in
that ditch--and you'll find the same work going on everywhere.
It isn't war."
"It's better than that," said another. "It's the eating-up of
a people. They come and they fill the trenches and they die,
and they die; and they send more and _those_ die. We do the
same, of course, but--look!"
He pointed to the large deliberate smoke-heads renewing
themselves along that yellowed beach. "That is the frontier
of civilization. They have all civilization against them
--those brutes yonder. It's not the local victories of the old
wars that we're after. It's the barbarian--all the barbarian.
Now, you've seen the whole thing in little. Come and look at
our children."