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Suddenly, however, we came upon a strange spectacle, a row of men with their backs to the trench-line, walking with extreme slowness and seriousness, in the most strict alignment, both as regards their front and the distances between them, across a piece of muddy pasture.
There are more ways of getting into kraals than there are ways of keeping people out. 'Will you take this chance? 'For certain, Dick. I am getting stiff with doing nothing, and if I sit in houses much longer I shall grow old. A man bet me five pounds on the ship that I could not get through a trench-line, and if there had been a trench-line handy I would have taken him on.
During the visit I was for a night a guest at Lord Haig's advanced headquarters, and from a little hill above the château in which he lived, I was able to see the trench-line by night. During dinner, the guns began to speak loudly, and after dinner I got one of the Staff to take me to the top of the down above the château to watch the lights of the battle-line. It was a memorable sight.
The line is pierced at intervals by railway-cuttings, which have to be barricaded, and canals, which require special defences. Almost every spot in either line is overlooked by some adjacent ridge, or enfiladed from some adjacent trench. And our trench-line, with its infinity of salients and re-entrants, is itself only part of the great salient of "Wipers."
But one day, when the War is over, and this mighty trench-line is thrown open to the disciples of the excellent Mr. Cook as undoubtedly it will be care should be taken that these street-names are preserved and perpetuated.
The flashes of our guns on one side, and of those of the Germans on the other, made an almost continuous line of pallid light. Besides, every minute or two, all along the front, one could see the German or British magnesium flares illuminating the trench-line. These flares are used as one uses a bull's-eye on a dark walk.
Fire on them! Let go! And prepare, if they come closer, to meet them with the bayonet." The shout went along that shattered trench-line, and men stood on what was left of the firebank, or leaned their pieces on the edge of a shell-crater or some pit into which they had crawled for shelter, and, turning the muzzles on the enemy, blazed into their masses.
There is no need to recall those other battles, the almost daily exchange of shots along the trench-line, though for the information of our readers it may be just as well to enumerate some of the more important. From the sea, in the neighbourhood of Nieuport, the line of trenches ran in a southerly direction across the flats of Belgium and Flanders in front of Ypres, and down towards Arras.
As already stated, this mighty fortress has been christened by its constructors, the Hohenzollern. It is attached to its parent trench-line by two communicating trenches, which the British Army, not to be outdone in reverence to the most august of dynasties, have named Big and Little Willie respectively.
Just as you turn the bull's-eye on any place which you are not quite sure of, so a flare-light is sent up when either side suspects evil designs on a particular part of their trench-line.
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