Otherwise they were as still as pig at
noonday.
We held on through the maze, past trench-sweepers of a handy
light pattern, with their screw-tailed charge all ready; and a
grave or so; and when I came on men who merely stood within
easy reach of their rifles, I knew I was in the second line.
When they lay frankly at ease in their dug-outs, I knew it was
the third. A shot-gun would have sprinkled all three.
"No flat plains," said Alan. "No hunting for gun positions
--the hills are full of them--and the trenches close together
and commanding each other. You see what a beautiful country
it is."
The Colonel confirmed this, but from another point of view.
War was his business, as the still woods could testify--but
his hobby was his trenches. He had tapped the mountain
streams and dug out a laundry where a man could wash his shirt
and go up and be killed in it, all in a morning; had drained
the trenches till a muddy stretch in them was an offence; and
at the bottom of the hill (it looked like a hydropathic
establishment on the stage) he had created baths where half a
battalion at a time could wash. He never told me how all that
country had been fought over as fiercely as Ypres in the West;
nor what blood had gone down the valleys before his trenches
pushed over the scalped mountain top.
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