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A moment or two later both those young Frenchmen following the tracks of that sinister German realized that a shaft led up from the room down below, and either the room itself borrowed its light from the gallery which in turn borrowed it from the embrasures and gun-emplacements on the farther side, or the shaft was merely for ventilation purposes.
The round helmets of the British took the place of the oblong helmets of the French along the parapet; British soldiers were in billets in place of the French in the villages at the rear and British guns moved into French gun-emplacements with the orderly precision which army training with its discipline alone secures; while the French Army was on board railway trains moving at given intervals of headway over rails restricted to their use on their way to Verdun where, under that simple French staff system which is the product of inheritance and previous training and this war's experience, they fell into place as a part of the wall of men and cannon.
Germans who lived in the neighbourhood, or who came across from the East for the winter, were politely tolerated, but the attitude toward them was one of growing watchfulness and distrust; and week by week the whispered stories of spies and gun-emplacements and secret stores of arms in these people's cellars or back gardens, grew more insistent and detailed.
There were no trenches in the desolate fields we passed through, but many shell-holes, and the banks of every road were honeycombed with shelters, dug-outs and gun-emplacements, rough defences that as the German Army retreated our men had taken over and altered to their own needs; while to the west lay the valley of the Sensée with its marshes, the scene of some of the most critical fighting of the war.
Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for their bed, right between two gun-emplacements. "We found the mother wild, out there in the woods," one of the men explained.
The model trenches with the latest improvements in plan, revetting, gun-emplacements, sally-ports, and the rest, spread through the sandy soil; the musketry ranges, bombing and bayonet schools are of the most recent and efficient type.
One trench mortar would consume in an hour plum puddings for an orphan school. For you might pause to think of it in this way if you chose. Thousands do at the front. Down on the banks of the Somme the blue uniforms of the French in place of the British khaki hovered around the gun-emplacements; the soixante-quinze with its virtuoso artistic precision was neighbor to the British eighteen-pounder.
"I see," said Ayling, surveying the position with real interest. He was beginning to enjoy selecting gun-emplacements which really mattered. It was a change from nine months of "eye-wash." When the German star-shell had spent itself they crossed the road, to the rear of the redoubt, and marked the other two emplacements in comparative safety now.
Half a mile away, at the foot of the ridge, a long irregular black line of thorn bushes enclosed the Dervish defences. Behind this zeriba low palisades and entrenchments bent back to the scrub by the river. Odd shapeless mounds indicated the positions of the gun-emplacements, and various casemates could be seen in the middle of the enclosure.
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