He was a small man, but how he could walk! I began to understand why the Boxers could not catch him. He turned back after we had gone a mile or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point where, just at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from battalion headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had yielded beet root in the last harvest, taking care not to step in shell-holes. Dusk settled into darkness. No human being was in sight except ourselves.
“There’s the first line of German trenches before the attack,” said my companion. “Our guns got fairly on them.” Dimly I saw what seemed like a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost out of the shape of a trench by British shells. “There was no living in it when the guns began all together. The only thing to do was to get out.”
Around us was utter silence, where the hell of thunders and destruction by the artillery had raged during the battle. Then a spent or ricochet bullet swept overhead, with the whistle of complaint of spent bullets at having travelled far without hitting any object. It had gone high over the British trenches; it had carried the full range; and the chance of its hitting any one was ridiculously small. But the nearer you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a victim. “Hit by a stray bullet!” is a very common saying at the front.
At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and following this we came to a peasant’s cottage. Inside, two soldiers were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a window stuffed with sandbags. On our way across the fields we had stepped on wires laid on the ground; we had stooped to avoid wires stretched on poles--the wires that form the web of the army’s intelligence.
Of course, no two units of communication are dependent on one wire. There is always a duplicate. If one is broken it is immediately repaired. The factories spin out wire to talk over and barbed wire for entanglements in front of trenches and weave millions of bags to be filled with sand for breastworks to protect men from bullets. If Sir John French wished, he could talk with Lord Kitchener in London and this battalion headquarters at Neuve Chapelle within the same space of time that a railroad president may speak over the long distance from Chicago to New York and order dinner out in the suburbs.