"That is the German trenches," said he. "They are five miles away.
Their gun-positions are in the woods. Our own trenches are invisible
from here."
It constituted a great moment, this first vision of the German
trenches. With the thrill came the lancinating thought: "All of France
that lies beyond that line, land just like the land on which I am
standing, inhabited by people just like the people who are talking to
me, is under the insulting tyranny of the invader." And I also thought,
as the sense of distance quickened my imagination to realise that
these trenches stretched from Ostend to Switzerland, and that the
creators of them were prosecuting similar enterprises as far north-
east as Riga, and as far southeast as the confines of Roumania:
"The brigands are mad, but they are mad in the grand manner."
We were at the front.
We had driven for twenty miles along a very busy road which was
closed to civilians, and along which even Staff officers could not
travel without murmuring the password to placate the hostile
vigilance of sentries. The civil life of the district was in abeyance,
proceeding precariously from meal to meal. Aeroplanes woke the
sleep. No letter could leave a post office without a precautionary
delay of three days.
Telegrams were suspect. To get into a railway station was almost as
difficult as to get into paradise. A passport or a safe-conduct was
the sine qua non of even the restricted liberty which had survived.
And yet nowhere did I see a frown nor hear a complaint. Everybody
comprehended that the exigencies of the terrific military machine
were necessary exigencies. Everybody waited, waited, in
confidence and with tranquil smiles. Also it is misleading to say that
civil life was in abeyance. For the elemental basis of its prosperity
and its amenities continued just as though the lunatic bullies of
Potsdam had never dictated to Vienna the ultimatum for Serbia. The
earth was yielding, fabulously. It was yielding up to within a mile and
a half of the German wire entanglements. The peasants would not
neglect the earth. Officers remonstrated with them upon their
perilous rashness. They replied: "The land must be tilled."
When the German artillery begins to fire, the blue-clad women sink
out of sight amid the foliage. Half an hour after it has ceased they
cautiously emerge, and resume. One peasant put up an umbrella,
but he was a man.
We were veritably at the front. There was, however, not a whisper of
war, nor anything visible except the thin, pale line like a striation on
the distant hills. Then a far-off sound of thunder is heard. It is a gun.
A faint puff of smoke is pointed out to us. Neither the rumble nor the
transient cloudlet makes any apparent impression on the placid and
wide dignity of the scene. Nevertheless, this is war. And war seems
a very vague, casual, and negligible thing. We are led about fifty
feet to the left, where in a previous phase a shell has indented a
huge hole in the earth. The sight of this hole renders war rather less
vague and rather less negligible.
"There are eighty thousand men in front of us," says an officer,
indicating the benign shimmering, empty landscape.
"But where?"
"Interred--in the trenches."
It is incredible.
"And the other interred--the dead?"