“I guess we’ll go up to the trenches now, Helen. They must be just over the hill, beyond that wood on the sky-line.”
But Miss Lane, as already noted, was wrong. The trenches did not lie just over the hill, for the very good reason that there were no trenches. We have grown so accustomed during this War to employing “trenches” as a synonym for “battle-line” that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is possible to fight upon the surface of the earth. For a long time both the Allies and the Hun suffered from a disease called “Trenchitis,” induced by an intensive experience of high explosive and machine-gun bullets. If a force wished to defend itself, it produced picks and shovels and dug itself in. If it wished to attack, it dug an advanced “jumping-off” trench in the dead of night, approached by saps and tunnels, and so made the open space to be covered in the assault as narrow as possible. This is a useful and economical way of fighting, especially when your troops are not sufficiently numerous to warrant prodigality. But it wastes much valuable time; and since the day when the entire American Nation was placed at the disposal of the Allies as a reinforcement, it has been found possible to employ other methods. Down South, on the Alsace-Lorraine front, where a lightly held outpost line runs for more than a hundred miles toward Belfort, trench warfare is still fashionable. But in the Argonne, where most of the fighting takes place in closely wooded country, we remain more or less above ground, maintaining touch with one another as best we can by means of an irregular chain of grass-pits or fortified shell-craters.
So when our pair of truants reached the wood on the sky-line, and penetrated cautiously to the other side, they beheld no trenches.
At their feet the road dropped steeply into a little valley, filled with woods which ran right up the slope beyond and disappeared into a smoky mist on the opposite crest. The sun had not fulfilled its early promise, and had disappeared by noon. A small drizzling rain was beginning to fall.
Helen Ryker, who loved her personal comforts, drew her blue cloak more closely round her, and shivered.
“They don’t have any trenches _here_,” she announced, in aggrieved tones.