War's Dark Frame/Where Men Are Like Ants
CHAPTER XVIII
WHERE MEN ARE LIKE ANTS
THE last afternoon I spent in Flanders we went on a picnic. It was a most extraordinary picnic, intended to give us a panoramic view of war as it is fought nine-tenths of the time under modern conditions. It took us to a point of the line that saw some of the hardest fighting of the Champagne and Artois offensive. The French had manned it then, and they had progressed in spite of overwhelming odds and frightful casualties. It was still, in the hands of the British, one of the knottiest problems of the entire front. We could understand why, but first we had our picnic. Williams chose the spot after we had left the cars in the shelter of a village behind a steep hill. At his direction one of the chauffeurs carried the baskets up a grassy bank and deposited them beneath a grove of trees. Trampled box hedges straggled here and there. It was a very pretty spot and we congratulated Williams for hitting on it.
“Yes," he answered, "it's just the thing, because the Hun airmen can't see us and disturb our luncheon."
He distributed sandwiches. Lamenting the absence of a corkscrew, he knocked the neck from a water bottle with some skill.
"Isn't much healthier around here than it was in Arras. Have some of this cold ham? This was a kitchen garden once. There was murderous fighting here less than a year ago."
As we ate, Williams' foresight was justified, for we heard the whirring of aeroplanes and, from beyond the hill, the booming of guns.
After luncheon we lounged in the grass, smoking. We wondered, when Williams had lighted another cigarette, why he delayed.
"Of course it's pleasant here.—" the foreign office man began. Williams glanced at his watch.
"I'm waiting," he said, "to see if the Huns are going to give us a strafing. They amuse themselves by dropping shells on this empty hill every now and then."
But, although the firing became general, no shells, as far as we could tell, exploded near us. So, bent like a party of scouts, we went through a fringe of bushes and around a ruined tower which already had the sentimental interest of a mediæval survival. We walked through a house which had no doors or roof into an overgrown back yard.
Williams stooped, kicking through the long grass at something. We went closer and saw him staring at a faded German uniform coat with sinister tears and stains about the back. An object, long and white, lay near by. In our own minds we hesitated to give it a name.
Williams moved on.
"All that's left of some poor devil,” he said.
“ I told you there had been hard fighting here."
As far as possible we kept out of the grass after that. Grass and weeds grow too quickly in the war zone. They permit too much to remain. We came to a barn with gaping holes in its sides and roof. Beyond it, half destroyed buildings clustered around a square with a monastic appearance. Between them and a ragged wall yawned an open space, perhaps ten yards across.
"Take that in a hurry," Williams commanded.
"The Huns can see us there."
We dashed across and circled the end of the wall into a small enclosure which was all that remained of an outhouse. Wire netting had been stretched across an eyeless window in the front wall. Through that the panorama of war was visible below us. Names rang in our ears that connote almost as much horror as Verdun. Not far from us stretched a brick wall, pierced for rifle and machine gun fire. Just beyond was a ruined farm, notorious for some of the worst hand to hand fighting of the war.
"From behind that wall, and from the farm, after they had got it," Williams said," the French went forth to the capture of that network of trenches off there, just behind our present front line."
You stared, not because of the familiar name of those trenches, but because it seemed impossible to you that men could have crossed the several hundred yards of open ground between the wall and the network. Even with artillery preparation such an attempt seemed suicidal.
But, as Williams told us, men had fallen all around here. To the left we could see deserted dug-outs, captured in September. At some distance a spur of land thrust out a broad plateau. It was absolutely bare. Before the war it had been thickly wooded.
The present British and German trenches made yellow scars along a low ridge. The German line was a little above the British. Both passed through a ruined village. As we watched, the bombardment became more violent. We could see the effect of every hit. Shell after shell of high explosives sent black clouds springing from the yellow earth. The lines were so close that it seemed inevitable mistakes should be made or that an imperfect fuse should shower death on the gunners' own men. But the accuracy of the fire was appalling. Each shell appeared to fall directly in the sorrel ditches, and when the spreading smudge had cleared away we would detect breaches, but the only men we saw were one or two soldiers who ran swiftly along the brown road towards the communication line.
"It's nearly always like that here," Williams said, "Fancy being under one of those Black Marias!"
Our fancy, however, was directed to a danger more immediate. We looked up at a whirring overhead and saw a war 'plane, flying high in our direction. As if born of the air five more appeared, sailed over the trenches, swerved back above us, and circled away again. They were too high to make identity certain, so we crouched as close as we could to the wall while we speculated.
Suddenly the anti-aircraft guns took a hand, and about each machine shrapnel burst, too high for us to hear its fat explosions; and as long as we remained there after that there was always a circle of little, puffy clouds around each aeroplane. The shells came from both sides, so that we knew 
© Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Barbed Wire Entanglements in Winter
Germans and British had taken the air to-day. Some one suggested that it mightn't be a bad plan to go home, but the spectacle fascinated. The rest of us begged for a few minutes more. We wanted, I think, to see one of these airmen show some sign of fear. As long as we watched they persisted in their scouting, contemptuous of the pretty white clouds that appeared as if from nothing all about them.
“It's a marvel they're not hit," the foreign office man cried.
"So it is," Williams answered. "It takes young men for that work, young men in whom recklessness is born."
For a long time we remained, glancing from the scouts to the trenches where black geysers spouted with an increasing frequency, forgetting for a time the possibility of a slight elevation of a single gun which might send a geyser spouting in the midst of our little group.
"Good God!" somebody burst out. "I can't believe there are men where those shells are falling. This thing makes men seem like ants."
We went at last, reluctant to leave this spectacle of death in which the victims remained always hidden.
Driving along the base of the hill we passed a large cemetery. Wooden crosses stretched in neat rows. The gun roar gave it an appearance exceptionally sinister. Even in their long rest, we realised, these soldiers were far from immune to German shells.
"The trench toll," Williams muttered. "Sad enough place! Every time I come here that cemetery's larger."
And just across the road the living busied themselves so the other fellow's cemetery wouldn't fail to grow. Some were practising at a rifle range. A rattling blacksmith shop lurked under a hill. Men fidgeted about two observation balloons, partly hidden by trees—gross, corpulent things, ready to take the air. And always the guns re- minded us that this care for the living and the dead was exercised under heavy fire.
Farther on we gazed with amazement at a football game which swept swiftly through its changing phases in a rough field to the left. The shouts of the players failed to reach us because of the pervading roar. They were like pupils in a deaf and dumb asylum from whose open, eager mouths comes only a shocking silence. But there was no question that they were having a good time, cheering clever plays, and jibing at bad ones. Within their easy view, close to the road, lay a dead man. His stolid, studded boots seemed striving to advance towards them. The stretcher bearers are coming for him," Williams whispered.
We swung into the long road again, increasing our speed.
If we could get over that next hill without a shell—
When we drove up to the château it was raining. Great drops fell from the caves like tears.
After dinner, when I was talking to Williams, I challenged the reliability of that new, frank British attitude.
“I'm looking," I said, "for some one to tell me he doesn't mind shell fire."
Williams snorted.
“When you find him you can call him a liar, and the worst of it is you never get used to it. Each time's a little worse than the last."
It was pleasant to look back that night, to forecast nothing on the morrow more exciting than the inspection of passes by military policemen, Scotland Yard detectives, and French soldiers.
I wondered that I had had the effrontery to buy a return ticket.
Doubtless, I thought, Paris would seem like a strange city in a peaceful and sorrowful world.