Some slept on the firing steps. As one
went along one became aware ever and again of two or three pairs of
clay-yellow feet sticking out of a clay hole, and peering down one
saw the shapes of men like rudely modelled earthen images of soldiers,
motionless in the cave.
I came round the corner upon a youngster with an intelligent face and
steady eyes sitting up on the firing step, awake and thinking. We looked
at one another. There are moments when mind leaps to mind. It is natural
for the man in the trenches suddenly confronted by so rare a beast as
a middle-aged civilian with an enquiring expression, to feel oneself
something of a spectacle and something generalised. It is natural for
the civilian to look rather in the vein of saying, "Well, how do you
take it?" As I pushed past him we nodded slightly with an effect of
mutual understanding. And we said with our nods just exactly what
General Joffre had said with his horizontal gestures of the hand and
what the King of Italy conveyed by his friendly manner; we said to each
other that here was the trouble those Germans had brought upon us and
here was the task that had to be done.
Our guide to these trenches was a short, stocky young man, a cob; with
a rifle and a tight belt and projecting skirts and a helmet, a queer
little figure that, had you seen it in a picture a year or so before the
war, you would most certainly have pronounced Chinese.
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