"Five minutes ago! He was found in the woods and brought here just as we arrived. He fell in an assault three days ago, and his men were unable to take him back with them. Three days and three nights lying between the lines! He was dying as much from cold and exhaustion as from his wounds when one of our patrols found him at daybreak. A fine, big fellow, isn't he?"
He was indeed, and well groomed, too. I had not noticed that at first. His uniform was a shade darker than that of an ordinary private; his trousers were fastened at the knees; his high, soft leather boots revealed a pair of muscular legs.
"Lieutenant of reserve, and probably commanding a company. But I hadn't either the time or inclination to question him. He had asked in French for an officer speaking German. They brought me. When I came up, he was lying beside the trench, eyes filming, lips blue, dying then but perfectly clear in his mind. He entrusted to my care some personal papers and letters which he requested me to forward to his people, advising them of his death through the intermediary of the Red Cross. He dictated their address and thanked me; then he let his head fall and was dead without even a sigh. A real man, that!"
I regained my trench sunk in melancholy thought. No longer did I see the forest about me, beautiful in its last and most splendid garb. Here is the trench, a narrow ditch between two vertical walls of earth. A few scattered men are fast asleep at the bottom of it. The night will see it peopled from end to end. And away beyond the edge of the wood there are more and still more trenches like this, one and all filled with soldiers. Further away, over the plain, are other trenches, but they are filled with soldiers who are not like ours. We dig, but over there, where the men in the spiked helmets teem, they too dig, and more and better than we do. I have watched them at work, these human moles. Along the Cuisy valley, I one day watched them through my glasses for hours, and saw them handling pick and shovel with a vigour that knew no pause or slackening. As soon as they can safely call a halt, the Boches instantly dig their holes and take refuge in them. If they advance, they entrench themselves, to ensure continued possession of the ground they have won. If they retreat, yet again they entrench in order the better to repulse the assaults hurled against them. And day by day I see, facing our lines, these entrenchments grow and extend, escalating hills, plunging into valleys, crossing plains; deep trenches with their parapets stark and clear against the sun, with their meshed miles of barbed wire rising high before the machine-gun emplacements.