It is difficult to keep an edge after hours of fresh air and
experiences; so one does not get the most from the most
interesting part of the day--the dinner with the local
headquarters. Here the professionals meet--the Line, the
Gunners, the Intelligence with stupefying photo-plans of the
enemy's trenches; the Supply; the Staff, who collect and note
all things, and are very properly chaffed; and, be sure, the
Interpreter, who, by force of questioning prisoners, naturally
develops into a Sadducee. It is their little asides to each
other, the slang, and the half-words which, if one understood,
instead of blinking drowsily at one's plate, would give the
day's history in little. But tire and the difficulties of a
sister (not a foreign) tongue cloud everything, and one goes
to billets amid a murmur of voices, the rush of single cars
through the night, the passage of battalions, and behind it
all, the echo of the deep voices calling one to the other,
along the line that never sleeps.
. . . . . . .
The ridge with the scattered pines might have hidden children
at play. Certainly a horse would have been quite visible, but
there was no hint of guns, except a semaphore which announced
it was forbidden to pass that way, as the battery was firing.
The Boches must have looked for that battery, too. The ground
was pitted with shell holes of all calibres--some of them as
fresh as mole-casts in the misty damp morning; others where
the poppies had grown from seed to flower all through the
summer.
"And where are the guns?" I demanded at last.
They were almost under one's hand, their ammunition in cellars
and dug-outs beside them. As far as one can make out, the 75
gun has no pet name. The bayonet is Rosalie the virgin of
Bayonne, but the 75, the watchful nurse of the trenches and
little sister of the Line, seems to be always "soixante-
quinze." Even those who love her best do not insist that she
is beautiful. Her merits are French--logic, directness,
simplicity, and the supreme gift of "occasionality." She is
equal to everything on the spur of the moment. One sees and
studies the few appliances which make her do what she does,
and one feels that any one could have invented her.