France at War | Page 2

Rudyard Kipling
left. I hope he'll appreciate it when he comes
back."
The car traversed a winding drive through woods, between banks
embellished with little chalets of a rustic nature. At first, the chalets
stood their full height above ground, suggesting tea-gardens in England.
Further on they sank into the earth till, at the top of the ascent, only
their solid brown roofs showed. Torn branches drooping across the
driveway, with here and there a scorched patch of undergrowth,
explained the reason of their modesty.
The chateau that commanded these glories of forest and park sat boldly
on a terrace. There was nothing wrong with it except, if one looked
closely, a few scratches or dints on its white stone walls, or a neatly
drilled hole under a flight of steps. One such hole ended in an
unexploded shell. "Yes," said the officer. "They arrive here
occasionally."
Something bellowed across the folds of the wooded hills; something
grunted in reply. Something passed overhead, querulously but not
without dignity. Two clear fresh barks joined the chorus, and a man
moved lazily in the direction of the guns.
"Well. Suppose we come and look at things a little," said the
commanding officer.
AN OBSERVATION POST
There was a specimen tree--a tree worthy of such a park--the sort of
tree visitors are always taken to admire. A ladder ran up it to a platform.
What little wind there was swayed the tall top, and the ladder creaked
like a ship's gangway. A telephone bell tinkled 50 foot overhead. Two
invisible guns spoke fervently for half a minute, and broke off like
terriers choked on a leash. We climbed till the topmost platform
swayed sicklily beneath us. Here one found a rustic shelter, always of
the tea-garden pattern, a table, a map, and a little window wreathed
with living branches that gave one the first view of the Devil and all his

works. It was a stretch of open country, with a few sticks like old
tooth-brushes which had once been trees round a farm. The rest was
yellow grass, barren to all appearance as the veldt.
"The grass is yellow because they have used gas here," said an officer.
"Their trenches are------. You can see for yourself."
The guns in the woods began again. They seemed to have no relation to
the regularly spaced bursts of smoke along a little smear in the desert
earth two thousand yards away--no connection at all with the strong
voices overhead coming and going. It was as impersonal as the drive of
the sea along a breakwater.
Thus it went: a pause--a gathering of sound like the race of an incoming
wave; then the high-flung heads of breakers spouting white up the face
of a groyne. Suddenly, a seventh wave broke and spread the shape of its
foam like a plume overtopping all the others.
"That's one of our torpilleurs--what you call trench-sweepers," said the
observer among the whispering leaves.
Some one crossed the platform to consult the map with its ranges. A
blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a little beyond the large plume.
It was as though the tide had struck a reef out yonder.
Then a new voice of tremendous volume lifted itself out of a lull that
followed. Somebody laughed. Evidently the voice was known.
"That is not for us," a gunner said. "They are being waked up
from------" he named a distant French position. "So and so is attending
to them there. We go on with our usual work. Look! Another
torpilleur."
"THE BARBARIAN"
Again a big plume rose; and again the lighter shells broke at their
appointed distance beyond it. The smoke died away on that stretch of
trench, as the foam of a swell dies in the angle of a harbour wall, and

broke out afresh half a mile lower down. In its apparent laziness, in its
awful deliberation, and its quick spasms of wrath, it was more like the
work of waves than of men; and our high platform's gentle sway and
glide was exactly the motion of a ship drifting with us toward that
shore.
"The usual work. Only the usual work," the officer explained.
"Sometimes it is here. Sometimes above or below us. I have been here
since May."
A little sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its chemical
yellow look more foul. A detachment of men moved out on a road
which ran toward the French trenches, and then vanished at the foot of
a little rise. Other men appeared moving toward us with that
concentration of purpose and bearing shown in both Armies
when--dinner is at hand. They looked like people who had been digging
hard.
"The same work. Always the same work!" the officer said. "And you
could walk from here to the sea or to Switzerland
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