A winter compounded of rain and fire had settled down heavily over the Aisne Valley and the plain of Champagne, from Rheims to Verdun. The chalky soil oozed gray and—red.

Deadlocked, their grip at each other's throats, German and Frenchman watched each other across a narrow, noisome waste, now and forever to become the symbol of all that is most horrible, most deadly, most pitiable:

No Man's Land!

Tens of thousands of men waited for the word of command which should bid them expose themselves to the unsated appetite of hungry slaughter, tens of thousands of men waited inactive while death and mutilation chose them, one by one.

A gray soil, a gray sky, and a gray doom.

The only thing that moved was the shuddering skin of the earth as the bullets flayed it in streaks or the shells dug deep holes like the festering sores[Pg 303] of a foul disease. Not a blade of grass, not a weed, not a shrub remained; where leafy woods once had been, now only a few scarred and slivered stumps pointed accusing fingers upward. It was Chaos come again.

Where were the shouting hosts charged with valor, such as those who had driven forward at La Fère Champenoise, when Foch's army saved France?

Gone!

Where were the gallant fights to save the guns, when men met in open combat under the open sky?

Gone!

Where were the cavalry charges when squadrons with saber or with lance clashed in a deadly but glorious shock?

Gone!

Where were the armies that had fought hand to hand in the streets of Charleroi; that had snatched at and escaped from death alternately in the great retreat; that had hurled themselves at each other with equal fury in the attack or the defense of Paris; that had charged up the slopes of Le Grand Couronne and the bluffs of the Aisne with equal gallantry, and, dying, still had shaken their fists in the face of Slaughter?

[Pg 304]

Gone, all gone!

Aye, gone indeed, but where?

Dug in!

Horace, off duty for a few hours from his post as military telephonist, for which he had fitted himself to qualify when his work as a motor cyclist was done, looked at the smitten world. He tried to compare the war before him with the war to which for one brief, wild month he had been so close. There was no comparison.

To nothing that the world has ever seen could the War of the Trenches be compared.

It was a cold, invisible inferno, which, every morning and evening, spewed up its ghastly tale of dead and wounded; which, every evening and morning, yielded up its line of staggering, weary, war-dulled figures, glad to exchange the peril of death for the miserable existence which was all that was possible behind the trenches in the plain of Champagne that first fearful winter.

The war of men was over, only a war of murderous moles remained.

In a rickety hovel behind the lines, which, as Horace's companion in the telephone work declared, was "weather-proof only when there wasn't any weather to put it to the proof," the boy[Pg 305] had puzzled over this new warfare. At last, one day, the opportunity serving, he hunted up his friend the veteran—now a sergeant-major—and learned the causes and the methods of the ditch-born strife.

Courtesy of "Le Miroir."

The Valley of the Dead.

Bombardment of shrapnel and high explosive shell, forming a barrage fire through which the men seen in the trench are about to plunge.

"Modern fighting," said the veteran, as he cleaned his rifle, a daily task in that rust-devouring atmosphere, "is the result of modern weapons. Whereas a musket would take two minutes to load and had a range of only a couple of hundred yards, a modern rifle will fire thirty shots a minute and over, and has a good killing range at an almost flat trajectory of a thousand yards. Suppose it takes a charging force of infantry six minutes to run a thousand yards, where a musket would get in three shots a modern rifle would put in from 180 to 300 shots, and would be firing almost continuously."

"Men would have to be under cover to face that fire," agreed Horace.

"More murderous than the rifle," the veteran continued, "is the machine-gun, which fires 600 shots a minute and can be operated by two men. It is estimated as being equal to fifty men, but, in reality, its destructiveness in the hands of a good gunner is far higher. It's easy to handle,[Pg 306] too, the Maxims weighing sixty pounds and our Hotchkiss fifty-three pounds, because the English weapon is water-cooled and ours is air-cooled."

"Which is best?"

"Ours," replied the veteran promptly, "because a Maxim, when it's firing steadily, gets so hot that it boils the water and the enemy can see the steam. Then he knows where you are and concentrates his fire and—you tuck in your toes and no one will ever wake you up."

"Invisibility counts," said the boy.

"It's the difference between life and death!" was the reply. "That's where the value of the trenches becomes evident. Since both rifles and machine-guns have a flat trajectory, when they do strike the ground, they do it at a very slight angle. If your head is ten inches below the level of the ground, a thousand men can fire at you with rifles and machine-guns a hundred yards away, and you can smoke a pipe comfortably and listen to the song of the bullets overhead.

"Shrapnel, especially when handled by the 'Soixante-Quinze,' which, in addition to being the best field-gun in the world, has the best shell with the best time-fuse, is more destructive against advancing troops than machine-gun and rifle-fire[Pg 307] combined, when it is rightly timed. Of course, it is far harder to aim exactly and to time to the second. A shrapnel shell holds 300 bullets and a 'Soixante-Quinze' can fire fifteen shells a minute. That means that one gun can send 4500 bullets a minute into an advancing enemy, the bullets scattering in a fan shape from the burst of the shell. The Boches, by the way, waste a tremendous amount of ammunition in bursting their shrapnel too high. I got hit, myself, with three balls from a shell which had burst too far away and they didn't even make a hole in my trousers; bruised me a bit, that was all.

"But you can see, my boy, when you've got rifle fire, machine-gun fire and shrapnel all looking for a different place to put a hole through you, a trench is the loveliest thing in the world, no matter if it's wet and slimy, full of smells and black with dried blood. The worst pool of filth would be a haven of refuge if only you could drop your body in it a few inches below the zone of certain death. If one gets caught once in the open, one never grumbles again about the labor of digging a trench."

"But why are trenches so twisty?" asked Horace. "One misty day, when it was safe, an[Pg 308] aviator took me up a little way, and I had a chance to look down on our trenches. I was only in the air a few minutes and we didn't go very high, but, although I know this section pretty well, I couldn't make head or tail out of our lines. They looked like a sort of scrawly writing, or a spider's web stretched out and tangled up."

"That's not a bad description," said the veteran thoughtfully, "they do look a little like that, with the communication trenches for the cross-threads. But there are a good many reasons why the trenches are made 'twisty' as you call it.

"In the first place, a trench is made zigzag, so that, if the enemy should make a sudden raid and seize a section of the trench, he can't fire along it and enfilade you. Then a trench that wavers in long uneven lines is much safer against shell-fire, for, supposing that the enemy does get the range of a piece of trench, his range will be wrong for the same trench ten yards farther on, the shells falling harmlessly in the ground before it or behind it.

"Besides that, a thin wavy line is much more difficult to see from an a?roplane than a straight line, because there are no straight lines in nature. That's why we've had to stop putting straw in[Pg 309] the trenches, the line of yellow was too easy to see from overhead."

"Is that why trenches are made so narrow?" the boy asked. "I've often thought it silly to make them so that two people can hardly squeeze past each other. The stretcher-bearers growl about it all the time."

"The ideal fire-trench," the veteran answered, "should be only about eighteen inches wide and not quite four feet deep, the upthrown earth forming a parapet. It should be recessed here and there, and traversed. To pass a man, you have to slide sideways. The communicating trench should be about fifteen yards to the rear. It should be seven feet deep and about three feet wide.

"Twenty-five yards in the rear is the cover trench, sixteen feet deep, and wide enough to allow troops to march in single file. The communication trenches from one line to another are always best as tunnels, though sometimes they are open. Our trenches here are open, but," the veteran nodded sagely, "I don't think they ought to be. This is a chalk soil, and the whitish soil underneath shows too clearly when you throw it up."

[Pg 310]

"The trenches wouldn't be so bad," said the lad, "if they weren't always wet."

"You can't change that," the veteran responded grimly, "unless you can find some way to make water run up-hill. It stands to reason that if you dig holes in the ground and it rains—as it does nearly all the time in this wretched northern country—the water is going to run into those holes. If you bale it out by day, the Boches see you, and if you pump at night, they hear you. If it rains, the trenches are going to be knee-deep in water and you can't help it."

"But how can you find your way, when one trench looks exactly like another and they're all twisting and turning like so many snakes trying to get warm?"

"You can't, unless you know the plans," the sergeant-major answered. "You've no idea of the amount of work that our draughtsmen have to do, in mapping out these underground cities and thousands of miles of ditch-streets. I know my little section, of course, and each officer has learned the tangle of trenches in which his command is likely to operate. But the officers have to know the tangle of the enemy's trenches, too, and, what's more, when we attack, they have to be in the front[Pg 311] and guide us. An assault isn't just a blind drive over the top, it must have a definite goal and has to be reached a certain way. The officers have got to know the Boche roads as well as our own."

"But how can they find that out?"

"Aeroplanes with photographers and draughtsmen," came the reply. "You've heard the story of the tattooed draughtsman?"

"No," answered Horace, "I haven't."

"He was a young fellow," the veteran began, "who was assigned to the job of making a plan of the enemy's trenches opposite his part of the line. The Boche lines were on a little higher ground than ours at that point, so that nothing could be seen from the fire trench. The young draughtsman went up in a machine several times, but there was a very efficient battery of anti-aircraft guns a little back of their lines and the Archies would not let our Farman a?roplane come down low enough for a photograph to show anything definite.

"This chap got desperate. He was bound to succeed, no matter what happened to him. At last, one night, we caught a Boche patrol on No Man's Land and wiped them out. As soon as the return fire slackened, the draughtsman, who had[Pg 312] been in one of the dug-outs, crawled out, and, wriggling flat to where the Boches had fallen, he grabbed one of the dead men by the ankle and dragged him to our trench.

"Then, unobtrusively and to our open-mouthed astonishment, the young draughtsman dressed himself in the dead man's uniform, read carefully all the papers in the pockets, so that he might learn who it was he was counterfeiting and bade us good-bye.

"'There's just about one chance in a million,' he said, 'that I don't get found out right away. If I am, then—' He clicked his tongue like a trigger. 'If I'm not caught and can manage to go back with the relief and return again,' he said, 'as soon as I get to the trench I'll bolt out of it, holding my left arm stretched out straight. You'll know by that, it's me. They'll pot me from behind, of course, but I may get half-way over No Man's Land before they do. If I drop, just smother the place where I fell with bullets so that the Boches don't have a chance to sneak out and get me.'

"'But that'll cut you to ribbons,' I said to him.

"He shrugged his shoulders.

"'I'll be dead, probably,' he said, 'and if I'm[Pg 313] not and you kill me, then it's only five minutes' difference, anyway.

"'Then, when it's night, let some of the fellows go out and drag me in. I've got an indelible pencil, and you'll find a map of the trenches on my chest.'"

"Did he go?"

"He did," the veteran answered. "We watched close all that night, all the next day and all the next night, till we were sure that he had been nabbed.

"Then, suddenly, one of our chaps called,

"'Here he comes!'

"Sure enough, just as it was getting light enough to see, a figure dressed like a Boche came jumping out of the trench holding his left arm stretched out straight and began a bolt across No Man's Land. He was running like a hare, but three or four rifles spoke. He dropped, wounded, and began to crawl, inch by inch, to our lines. Then they got a machine-gun full on him and began to spray him with bullets, like you sprinkle a flower-bed in summer.

"He didn't wriggle very far.

"We answered them hot and heavy. We didn't leave room for a worm to crawl up to him, much[Pg 314] less a man. Then, when night came, some of our fellows drove a sap to where he lay and hooked down the body."

"And the map?"

"Scrawled on his bare chest, the way he said it would be," the veteran answered, "and underneath was written in the same smeared violet marks the word:

"'Victory!'"

"You can't beat France when it comes to heroism!" declared Horace.

"The English are just as nervy," answered the veteran. "Even in the trenches, though, they fight differently. They make far fewer night attacks than we do, and far more mines. There's few nights that the British haven't got a listening patrol out somewhere on the line."

"I hear every one talking of a 'listening patrol,'" put in the lad; "tell me, Sergeant, just what a listening patrol is for."

"To listen," answered the veteran laconically.

"Of course, but for what?"

The answer came, sinister,

"Mines!"

"Ah!" Horace had seen the effects of those most terrible of all weapons of trench warfare.

Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."

Listening Patrol Trapped by a Star-Shell.

Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."

Locating Enemy Sappers on a Listening Patrol.

[Pg 315]

"You see," the veteran explained, "when trenches are well and solidly dug, especially the way the Germans build them; when solid machine-gun emplacements are made and properly manned with plenty of ammunition; when there is a concentration of artillery to support the trenches on both sides, nobody can do much. Of course, they shell us all the time, and we shell them. They send over rifle-bombs and we shoot ammonal and vitriol grenades. Once in a while, if they're lucky, they'll land a 'Minnenwerfer' in one of our trenches and then there's a little work for the doctor and a lot for the grave-digger."

"What's a 'Minnenwerfer'?"

"A pleasant little toy the Germans have invented, which looks like a rubber ball at the end of a stick. Its right name is the 'Krupp trench howitzer.' It weighs only 120 pounds—at least one of them that we captured, weighed that—and can be handled by a couple of men. Although it has a caliber of only 2.1-inch it throws a shell of 16-inch diameter."

"How on earth can it do that?" asked the boy. "You can't squeeze a 16-inch shell down a 2.1-inch muzzle!"

"That's what the stick is for," came the reply.[Pg 316] "The shell is round, like one of the old-fashioned cannon-balls you see piled up in village squares beside antiquated cannon. It weighs 200 pounds and has a bursting charge of 86 pounds of tri-nitro-toluol. The shell is bored to the center. You shove one end of the iron rod into the gun so that it sticks out about eight inches beyond the muzzle. Then you put the shell on the rod by the hole bored to the center. It looks like a toy balloon at the end of a child's toy cannon. Then you fire it, the iron rod is shot out, driving the bomb ahead of it and off she goes."

"Will it go far?"

"Far enough," the veteran said. "At an angle of projection of 45 degrees with the low muzzle velocity of 200 feet per second, the range of the bomb is 1244 feet and it takes eight seconds to come. That's the only good thing about it, sometimes you can hear it coming soon enough to dodge into a dug-out. But neither Minnenwerfers, nor the 5.6-inch nor even the 8.4-inch howitzers will win a trench. It takes mines to do that.

"So, in order to gain an advantage, one side or the other burrows deep tunnels in the earth, sometimes 16 feet down, sometimes 60, all depending on the soil and the plan. The men work underground[Pg 317] like moles and they drive a long subterranean gallery until they come right below an important point, maybe an officers' dug-out or a grenade depot. Then they burrow upwards a bit, and put in a tremendous charge of explosive, melinite or something like that, and fix an electric wire. The earth is then rammed back into the gallery, an electric contact is made and whiz! bang! about forty tons of mixed heads, legs, bits of bomb-proof and earth go flying into the air, leaving a hole big enough to build a bungalow in and never see the roof.

"Then it's our turn. While the section of the Boche line is in confusion we dash across, while our artillery, behind us, smothers the rest of the line. We settle in the big hole and build our trenches from it and we've g............