Letters from France | Page 5

halo of light. It was
the field guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German
parapet.
Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in
France.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST IMPRESSION--A COUNTRY WITH EYES

France, April, 1916.
Rich green meadows. Rows of tall, slender elm trees along the hedges.
Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with
their thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a
row of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn
under the tall trees just bursting into green. Violets--great bunches of
them--in the patches of scrub between the tall trunks and yellow
cowslips and white and pink anemones and primroses. You see the
flaxen-haired children out in the woods and along the roadside
gathering them. A rosy-cheeked woman stands in the doorway of a
farm at the cross-roads, and a golden-haired youngster, scarce able to
run as yet, totters across the road to her, laughing.
Only this morning, as we passed that same house, there was the low
whine of a shell, and a metallic bang like the sound of a dented
kerosene tin when you try to straighten the bend in it. Then another and
another and another. We could see the white smoke of the shells
floating past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few
fields away. It drifted slowly through the trees and then came another
salvo. There were some red roofs near--those of a neighbouring
farm--but we could not see whether they were firing at them, or at some
sign of moving troops, or at a working party if there were any; and I do
not know now. As we came back that way in the afternoon there was
more shelling farther along. The woman in the doorway simply turned
her head in its direction for a moment, and so did a younger woman
who came to the doorway behind her. Then they turned to the baby
again.
Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages
farther on had mostly been battered and broken. There was a road
running at a little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been
shattered. There was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups
of buildings there, all shattered, burnt and gaping, like the tangled
nightmare of desolation on the morning after a great city fire. Farther
still was open country again, where long communication trenches
began to run through the fields--but you could see none of this from

where we stood. Only in the distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have
noticed, if we had looked for it, an occasional broken tree
trunk--snapped off short or broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire.
Those distant trees would be growing over our firing line--or the
German.
It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of
its waterlogged ditches and the rain which had fallen miserably almost
every day since we arrived. There is green grass up to within a few
yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of
powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles. Here
you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which
on a fine day fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away
from the lines. The country is flat and you see no sign of the enemy's
trenches, or your own--the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as
completely as if they did not exist.
[Illustration: "AN OCCASIONAL BROKEN
TREE-TRUNK--SNAPPED OFF SHORT, OR BROKEN DOWN AT
A SHARP ANGLE, BY SHELL FIRE"]
[Illustration: NO MAN'S LAND The barrier which stretches from
Belgium to the Swiss border and which not the millions of Rockefeller
could enable him to cross]
But you realise, when you have been in that country for a little while,
that you have eyes upon you all the time--you are being watched as you
have never been watched in your life before. You move along the
country road as you would walk along the roads about your own home,
until, sooner or later, things happen which make you think suddenly
and think hard. You are passing, a dozen of you together instead of the
usual two or three, through those green fields by those green hedgerows
when there is a sharp whiz and a crash, and a shrapnel shell from a
German seventy-seven (their field gun) bursts ten yards behind you.
You are standing at a corner studying a map, and you notice that a
working party is passing the corner frequently on some duty or another.
You were barely aware that there was a house near you.

Twenty-four hours later