"It is not often in this war that we can see our enemy unless we visit
them in their trenches, or they come to us," said the general, "but a
few days ago, when I was in the trapeze, I saw one of them stooping
down as though gathering something in his hands or tying up
his boot-laces." Those words were spoken by a man who had
commanded French troops for nine months of incessant fighting
which reveal the character of this amazing war. He was delighted
because he had seen a German soldier in the open and found it a
strange unusual thing. Not a sign of any human being could I see as I
gazed over the great battlefields of France. There was no glint of
helmets, no flash of guns, no movements of regiments, no stirring of
the earth. There was a long tract of country in which no living thing
moved: utterly desolate in its abandonment. Yet beneath the earth
here, close to us as well as far away, men crouched in holes waiting
to kill or to be killed, and all along the ridges, concealed in dug-outs or
behind the low-lying crests, great guns were firing so that their
thunder rolled across the ravines, and their smoke-clouds rested for a
little while above the batteries.
The general was pointing out a spot on Hill 196 where the Germans
still held a ridge.
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