As we plowed through a heavy cross road to Mouchy le Preux and came out on the highway to Arras, we saw a German battery. The last stars had withdrawn, and in the grayish morning light the clanking field pieces lumbered by, a ghostly company with vague gray ghostly men on ghostly horses. I imagined they were moving parallel to the firing line, changing position. How close were we now? Probably six kilometers. Two miles riding up the road to Arras with the battlefield of October 1st, the muddy, desolated fields on either side. It was up this road that the French artillery made its retreat, across those fields that their infantry poured with the Duke of Altenburg's Saxonians in hot pursuit. Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann had told me that the French had given way all along the line here before the German second drive, retreating to Arras, which they now held. I remember that he had spoken of Arras as an objective and that the Germans were constantly drawing nearer. How close were they now? How far from the French would we be in the trench? One began to feel a tremulous excitement.
Hauptmann Kliewer and Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann told us that this was as far as they dared go with the motors. To approach closer than two kilometers to Arras with automobiles, and we easily would be discerned by the French artillery observers. Evidently having been telephoned that we were coming, two gray cloaked officers were waiting for us outside a little brown shack that I guessed was regimental headquarters. The Captain, an intelligent looking Prussian--and, by the way, I've yet to see one of the upturned mustached bullies of whom our cartoonists are so fond--spoke perfect English.
"Leave your overcoats here," he advised. "It's rather warm going up to the trenches." Then he glanced at our feet and gave an approving nod. "No pumps or gaiters, I see. That's good; you'll be up to your knees in water," and as I walked up the road towards Arras, he told me that two Italian journalists--any newspaper man is a journalist in Europe--had visited the trenches at Arras. And the Captain laughed. "One wore a pair of gray spats and the other had one of those artist ties, those black fluffy things. One of our soldiers drew a sketch of them." When we had gone about a hundred yards, we turned to the right, descending by an abrupt runaway into a trench that dug in a plowed field, led away at right angles from the road. More than a thousand meters from the French trench, and with rifle fire yet to begin, and shielded by the very fact that you walked in a narrow pit seven feet under ground, comparatively less in danger than you had been in the motor from Mouchy le Preux on, you nevertheless tingled with a strange exhilaration. Keeping one eye on the top of the trench, prepared to duck, lest it suddenly became uniform in height and expose your head to the open field, gazing the rest of the time at the bottom of the pit, lest you slip in a hole and go sprawling in the yellow liquid ooze, we followed the officers, slavishly imitating their movements of progress. Then we came to another trench that made a right angle with our own, advancing towards the firing line, parallel to the road we had left as unsafe, exactly as in the approach trenches at Labasse. But as we trudged on, splashing now and then through water to our knees, we no longer imitated the officers. They walked as before, unconcernedly and erect. We were going along ducking our backs, for shrapnel was beginning to fly in a neighboring field, and I heard it panging in the mud on all sides.