A proportion of men were standing to arms while others ate;
but dinner-time is slack time, even among animals, and it was
close on noon.
"The Boches got _their_ soup a few days ago," some one
whispered. I thought of the pulverized hillside, and hoped it
had been hot enough.
We edged along the still trench, where the soldiers stared,
with justified contempt, I thought, upon the civilian who
scuttled through their life for a few emotional minutes in
order to make words out of their blood. Somehow it reminded
me of coming in late to a play and incommoding a long line of
packed stalls. The whispered dialogue was much the same:
"Pardon!" "I beg your pardon, monsieur." "To the right,
monsieur." "If monsieur will lower his head." "One sees best
from here, monsieur," and so on. It was their day and
night-long business, carried through without display or heat, or
doubt or indecision. Those who worked, worked; those off duty,
not five feet behind them in the dug-outs, were deep in their
papers, or their meals or their letters; while death stood ready
at every minute to drop down into the narrow cut from out of the
narrow strip of unconcerned sky. And for the better part of a
week one had skirted hundreds of miles of such a frieze!
The loopholes not in use were plugged rather like
old-fashioned hives. Said the Colonel, removing a plug:
"Here are the Boches. Look, and you'll see their sandbags."
Through the jumble of riven trees and stones one saw what
might have been a bit of green sacking. "They're about seven
metres distant just here," the Colonel went on. That was
true, too. We entered a little fortalice with a cannon in it,
in an embrasure which at that moment struck me as
unnecessarily vast, even though it was partly closed by a
frail packing-case lid. The Colonel sat him down in front of
it, and explained the theory of this sort of redoubt. "By the
way," he said to the gunner at last, "can't you find something
better than _that?"_ He twitched the lid aside. "I think
it's too light. Get a log of wood or something."