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　　CHAPTER XII

　　One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the salient it seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy but a little undergrowth—and the queerest part of it all was the sense of safety, the ridiculously false security with which one could wander about the village and up the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that one's movements were being watched by German eyes and that the whole place could be blown off the face of the earth... but for the convenient fact that the Germans, who were living in the village of Curlu, beyond the footpath, were under our own observation and at the mercy of our own guns.

　　That sounded like a fairy-tale to men who, in other places, could not go over the parapet of the first-line trenches, or even put their heads up for a single second, without risking instant death.

　　I stood on a hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but after an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxt'ition with the British infantry surrounding them—it was a cheery bivouac among the trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of burning wood—the lieutenant insisted upon leading the way to the top of the hill.

　　He made a slight detour to point out a German shell which had fallen there without exploding, and made laughing comments upon the harmless, futile character of those poor Germans in front of us. They did their best to kill us, but oh, so feebly!

　　Yet when I took a pace toward the shell he called out, sharply, “Ne touchez pas!” I would rather have touched a sleeping tiger than that conical piece of metal with its unexploded possibilities, but bent low to see the inscriptions on it, scratched by French gunners with wore recklessness of death. Mort aux Boches was scrawled upon it between the men's initials.

　　Then we came to the hill-crest and to the last of our trenches, and, standing there, looked down upon the villages of Vaux and Curlu, separated by a piece of marshy water. In the farthest village were the Germans, and in the nearest, just below us down the steep cliff, our own men. Between the two there was a narrow causeway across the marsh and a strip of woods half a rifle-shot in length.

　　Behind, in a sweeping semicircle round their village and ours, were the German trenches and the German guns. I looked into the streets of both villages as clearly as one may see into Clovelly village from the crest of the hill. In Vaux-sur-Somme a few British soldiers were strolling about. One was sitting on the window-sill of a cottage, kicking up his heels.

　　In the German village of Curlu the roadways were concealed by the perspective of the houses, with their gables and chimney-stacks, so that I could not see any passers—by. But at the top of the road, going out of the village and standing outside the last house on the road, was a solitary figure—a German sentry.

　　The French lieutenant pointed to a thin mast away from the village on the hillside.

　　“Do you see that? That is their flagstaff. They hoist their flag for victories. It wagged a good deal during the recent Russian fighting. But lately they have not had the cheek to put it up.”

　　This interpreter—the Baron de Rosen—laughed very heartily at that naked pole on the hill.

　　Then I left him and joined our own men, and went down a steep hill into Vaux, well outside our line of trenches, and thrust forward as an outpost in the marsh. German eyes could see me as I walked. At any moment those little houses about me might have been smashed into rubbish heaps. But no shells came to disturb the waterfowl among the reeds around.

　　And so it was that the life in this place was utterly abnormal, and while the guns were silent except for long—range fire, an old-fashioned mode of war—what the adjutant of this little outpost called a “gentlemanly warfare,” prevailed. Officers and men slept within a few hundred yards of the enemy, and the officers wore their pajamas at night. When a fight took place it was a chivalrous excursion, such as Sir Walter Manny would have liked, between thirty or forty men on one side against somewhat the same number on the other.

　　Our men used to steal out along the causeway which crossed the marsh—a pathway about four feet wide, broadening out in the middle, so that a little redoubt or blockhouse was established there, then across a narrow drawbridge, then along the path again until they came to the thicket which screened the German village of Curlu.

　　It sometimes happened that a party of Germans were creeping forward from the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in party-colored clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them invisible between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then suddenly contact was made.

　　Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles, the zip-zip of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of invisibility. It was a sharp encounter one night when the Loyal North Lancashires held the village of Vaux, and our men brought back many German helmets and other trophies as proofs of victory. Then to bed in the village, and a good night's rest, as when English knights fought the French, not far from these fields, as chronicled in the pages of that early war correspondent, Sir John Froissart.

　　All was quiet when I went along the causeway and out into the wood, where the outposts stood listening for any crack of a twig which might betray a German footstep. I was startled when I came suddenly upon two men, almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they stood, motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through the brushwood. If I had followed the path on which they stood for just a little way I should have walked into the German village. But, on the other hand, I should not have walked back again....

　　When I left the village, and climbed up the hill to our own trenches again, I laughed aloud at the fantastic visit to that grim little outpost in the marsh. If all the war had been like this it would have been more endurable for men who had no need to hide in holes in the earth, nor crouch for three months below ground, until an hour or two of massacre below a storm of high explosives. In the village on the marsh men fought at least against other men, and not against invisible powers which belched forth death.

　　It was part of the French system of “keeping quiet” until the turn of big offensives; a good system, to my mind, if not carried too far. At Frise, next door to Vaux, in a loop of the Somme, it was carried a little too far, with relaxed vigilance.

　　It was a joke of our soldiers to crawl on and through the reeds and enter the French line and exchange souvenirs with the sentries.

　　“Souvenir!” said one of them one day. “Bullet—you know—cartouche. Comprenny?”

　　A French poilu of Territorials, who had been dozing, sat up with a grin and said, “Mais oui, mon vieux,” and felt in his pouch for a cartridge, and then in his pockets, and then in the magazine of the rifle between his knees.

　　“Fini!” he said. “Tout fini, mon p'tit camarade.”

　　The Germans one day made a pounce on Frise, that little village in the loop of the Somme, and “pinched” every man of the French garrison. There was the devil to pay, and I heard it being played to the tune of the French soixante-quinzes, slashing over the trees.

　　Vaux and Curlu went the way of all French villages in the zone of war, when the battles of the Somme began, and were blown off the map. Now It Can Be Told