The constant bombardment often changed so completely the topography of the mountains, one could hardly be sure when daylight came that he was the same man, or in the same place, as he was the night before.
We were beyond civilization. Not a flower, a garden, a cow, a chicken, a house with a door or window, or roof, not a civilian or a woman was to be seen. All work or fight, no recreation, it was a long, continued suffering. We had the Boche part of the time, bad weather all the time.
The trenches were so close together we fought with grenades instead of rifles. The wire in front, thrown out loose from the trench behind, was all shot up. The trench itself from continued bombardment was thirty or forty feet across the top, with just a narrow path down the middle, where one walked below the ground level. The hills were a wilderness of craters, blown out trenches with unexploded shells about.
Crosses leaning over dead men’s graves, were littered with ragged, empty sandbags, while pieces of splintered timber, tangled wire, mingled with broken boulders and lacerated tree trunks of all lengths and thickness. Holes grew now where trees had stood. Roots and stumps, upturned, replaced splintered branches and scorched, withered leaves. A few straggling, upright trunks, eighty to one hundred feet in the air, were festooned with sections of blown-up barbed wire.
The towns belonged to the dead, wholly deserted by civilians, with even the old women gone. Roofless, doorless, windowless ruins, twisted iron girders and fantastically broken walls, stood out against the sky, grimly eloquent, though silent, monuments of kultur.
Face to face with death, what is in a man comes out. I shall never forget one, who, right name unknown, came from Marseilles. We used to call him “Coquin de Dieu.” He had some system whereby he got extra wine—even at the front. That additional cup or two was just enough to make him happy and start him singing. Handsome as a woman, he looked the careless, reckless ne’er-do-well. During a terrific bombardment, I was sent to relieve him, out between two German outposts, one eight, the other fifteen yards away. Instead of going to the safety of the sap in the rear, that Frenchman insisted on staying with me. Germans broke into the French trench at the adjoining post, and went to the right. Had they come left, we would have been the first victims.