Said the Colonel, removing a plug:
"Here are the Boches. Look, and you'll see their sandbags."
Through the jumble of riven trees and stones one saw what
might have been a bit of green sacking. "They're about seven
metres distant just here," the Colonel went on. That was
true, too. We entered a little fortalice with a cannon in it,
in an embrasure which at that moment struck me as
unnecessarily vast, even though it was partly closed by a
frail packing-case lid. The Colonel sat him down in front of
it, and explained the theory of this sort of redoubt. "By the
way," he said to the gunner at last, "can't you find something
better than _that?"_ He twitched the lid aside. "I think
it's too light. Get a log of wood or something."
HANDY TRENCH-SWEEPERS
I loved that Colonel! He knew his men and he knew the Boches
--had them marked down like birds. When he said they were
beside dead trees or behind boulders, sure enough there they
were! But, as I have said, the dinner-hour is always slack,
and even when we came to a place where a section of trench had
been bashed open by trench-sweepers, and it was recommended to
duck and hurry, nothing much happened. The uncanny thing was
the absence of movement in the Boche trenches. Sometimes one
imagined that one smelt strange tobacco, or heard a rifle-bolt
working after a shot.
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