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Lying under a bomb-proof when the Fourth of July bombardment started, I saw Dick going unhurriedly down the hill for his glasses, which he had left in Colonel Roosevelt's tent, and unhurriedly going back up to the trenches again. Under the circumstances I should have been content with my naked eye. A bullet thudded close to where Dick lay with a soldier. "That hit you?" asked Dick.
The Allies' losses will begin when they take the offensive against the German works which are now being constructed. Soon England will have 600,000 more men on the Continent and there will be more doing. "The losses of the Germans have been two or three times the losses of the Allies in the Belgian trenches, because the Germans have been the attacking parties.
Cronje had suddenly become aware of the net which was closing round him. To the dark fierce man who had striven so hard to make his line of kopjes impregnable it must have been a bitter thing to abandon his trenches and his rifle pits.
"There came one day when he wrote to us saying that he was out behind the trenches waiting for an attack which they were to make in two hours' time. He had had his breakfast, and was smoking his pipe quite content. There the letter ended, and for three days no letter came from my dear friend.
The Germans opposite became suspicious on seeing our line so silent, and no man showing himself; they, too, waited on the alert behind their loopholes. But along the rest of their front their men kept on coming out from their trenches unarmed, and making merry and friendly gestures. I became uneasy, and wondered how this unexpected comedy might end.
All the same, the tanks or rather these tell-tale marks beside this front trench of the Hindenburg line, together with that labyrinth of trenches, cut by the Canal du Nord, which fills the whole eastern scene to the horizon remain in my mind as somehow representative of the two main facts which, according to all one can read and all one can gather from the living voices of those who know, dominated the last stage of the war.
The tents in their ranks were filled as soon as made. Firing as they marched, their aim was splendid, their coolness was superb, and their courage aroused the admiration of their comrades. Their advance was greeted with wild cheers from the white regiment's, and with an answering shout they pressed onward over the trenches they had taken close in the pursuit of the retreating enemy.
He was to have been a great doctor, a great healer, one who bound up wounds, and make weak men strong and now in the trenches, he stands, this lad of hers, with the weapons of death in his hands, with bitter hatred in his heart, not binding wounds, but making them, sending poor human beings out in the dark to meet their Maker, unprepared, surrounded by sights and sounds that must harden his heart or break it.
"What can I do?" he exclaimed. "If I forbid one thing he bobs up with something else. Look at him! He's the laziest man I ever saw. We named him 'His Lordship' the moment of his arrival in our midst, and bets were made that he would succumb after the first day's march. Not a bit of it! He looked tired at the start, but he looked no more so at the finish. We were finally placed in the trenches.
They said that President Wilson had bided his time so that his country might strut as a belligerent for only the last six months, and so obtain a voice in the peace negotiations. He did not intend that America should fight, and was only getting his armies ready that they might enforce peace when the Allies were exhausted and already counting on Americans manning their trenches.
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