FRONT LINE PROFESSIONALS
A proportion of men were standing to arms while others ate;
but dinner-time is slack time, even among animals, and it was
close on noon.
"The Boches got _their_ soup a few days ago," some one
whispered. I thought of the pulverized hillside, and hoped it
had been hot enough.
We edged along the still trench, where the soldiers stared,
with justified contempt, I thought, upon the civilian who
scuttled through their life for a few emotional minutes in
order to make words out of their blood. Somehow it reminded
me of coming in late to a play and incommoding a long line of
packed stalls. The whispered dialogue was much the same:
"Pardon!" "I beg your pardon, monsieur." "To the right,
monsieur." "If monsieur will lower his head." "One sees best
from here, monsieur," and so on. It was their day and
night-long business, carried through without display or heat, or
doubt or indecision. Those who worked, worked; those off duty,
not five feet behind them in the dug-outs, were deep in their
papers, or their meals or their letters; while death stood ready
at every minute to drop down into the narrow cut from out of the
narrow strip of unconcerned sky. And for the better part of a
week one had skirted hundreds of miles of such a frieze!
The loopholes not in use were plugged rather like
old-fashioned hives.
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