There were no trees above us now. Their trunks lay along the
edge of the trench, built in with stones, where necessary, or
sometimes overhanging it in ragged splinters or bushy tops.
Bits of cloth, not French, showed, too, in the uneven lines of
debris at the trench lip, and some thoughtful soul had marked
an unexploded Boche trench-sweeper as "not to be touched." It
was a young lawyer from Paris who pointed that out to me.
We met the Colonel at the head of an indescribable pit of
ruin, full of sunshine, whose steps ran down a very steep
hillside under the lee of an almost vertically plunging
parapet. To the left of that parapet the whole hillside was
one gruel of smashed trees, split stones, and powdered soil.
It might have been a rag-picker's dump-heap on a colossal
scale.
Alan looked at it critically. I think he had helped to make
it not long before.
"We're on the top of the hill now, and the Boches are below
us," said he. "We gave them a very fair sickener lately."
"This," said the Colonel, "is the front line."
There were overhead guards against hand-bombs which disposed
me to believe him, but what convinced me most was a corporal
urging us in whispers not to talk so loud. The men were at
dinner, and a good smell of food filled the trench. This was
the first smell I had encountered in my long travels uphill--a
mixed, entirely wholesome flavour of stew, leather, earth, and
rifle-oil.