First, of course, we had to present ourselves to the General in Command of the next Army Corps which we were to visit. We reached his headquarters after half an hour's run and found him an interesting and agreeable man of the world. He was much upset by the death the day before of a Lieutenant of engineers. It appears that this Lieutenant had been in command of a sap that was being run under the German trenches in order to explode a mine. The Germans had counter-sapped, broken into his tunnel, and exploded a mine there. He had recklessly crawled down his sap and had not returned. Then his Colonel crawled down the little tunnel after him, first taking the precaution to have a rope tied on to himself. The soldiers at the French end of the tunnel paid out the rope till it suddenly stopped. Then, as there was no more movement, they became alarmed and, hauling in the rope, dragged the Colonel back in a senseless condition. The Lieutenant had reached the neighborhood of the exploded mine and had been overcome and killed by the unescaped gases of the explosion. The Colonel in his turn had been overcome, but had been hauled out in time to be revived.
It was strange to see how this loss was taken to heart by a General who must in the past months have had to receive reports of deaths by the thousand.
We motored on and about eleven o'clock were ushered into the headquarters of the General of Division whose batteries we wanted to see.
The other Generals had greeted us in the luxurious _salons_ of châteaus, sitting near writing-desks holding a few papers, but without any token of the military work on which they were engaged. This General was housed with his staff in an old shooting-box. The room in which he welcomed us had large-scale maps on its walls, and engineering plans on its tables. The General himself was a splendid type of French officer, remarkably young, wiry, snappy, keen as mustard. When the war began he had been a Lieutenant-Colonel and had gone up the ladder by leaps and bounds.
He said he would begin by himself taking us to an observation-point at the top of a high hill, whence we could follow the whole sweep of front from about the point where it had yesterday run out of our sight, on for many miles to the Aisne and well beyond it.