HANDY TRENCH-SWEEPERS
I loved that Colonel! He knew his men and he knew the Boches
--had
them marked down like birds. When he said they were
beside dead trees or behind boulders, sure enough there they
were! But, as I have said, the dinner-hour is always slack,
and even when we came to a place where a section of trench had
been bashed open by trench-sweepers, and it was recommended to
duck and hurry, nothing much happened. The uncanny thing was
the absence of movement in the Boche trenches. Sometimes one
imagined that one smelt strange tobacco, or heard a rifle-bolt
working after a shot. Otherwise they were as still as pig at
noonday.
We held on through the maze, past trench-sweepers of a handy
light pattern, with their screw-tailed charge all ready; and a
grave or so; and when
I came on men who merely stood within
easy reach of their rifles, I knew I was in the second line.
When they lay frankly at ease in their dug-outs, I knew it was
the third. A shot-gun would have sprinkled all three.
"No flat plains," said Alan. "No hunting for gun positions
--the hills are full of them--and the trenches close together
and commanding each other. You see what a beautiful country
it is."
The Colonel confirmed this, but from another point of view.
War was his business, as the still woods could testify--but
his hobby was his trenches. He had tapped the mountain
streams and dug out a laundry where a man could wash his shirt
and go up and be killed in it,
all in a morning; had drained
the trenches till a muddy stretch in them was an offence; and
at the bottom of the hill (it looked like a hydropathic
establishment on the stage) he had created baths where half a
battalion at a time could wash. He never told me how all that
country had been fought over as fiercely as Ypres in the West;
nor what blood had gone down the valleys before his trenches
pushed over the scalped mountain top. No. He sketched out
new endeavours in earth and stones and trees for the comfort
of his men on that populous mountain.
And there came a priest, who was a sub-lieutenant, out of a
wood of snuff-brown shadows and half-veiled trunks. Would it
please me to look at a chapel?
It was all open to the
hillside, most tenderly and devoutly done in rustic work with
reedings of peeled branches and panels of moss and thatch--St.
Hubert's own shrine. I saw the hunters who passed before it,
going to the chase on the far side of the mountain where their
game lay.
. . . . . . .
