# War's Dark Frame/The Amazing Garden

CHAPTER VIII
THE AMAZING GARDEN
IT was in Champagne that I accomplished for the first time the much desired experience of entering the front line trenches. Such an excursion isn't without its discomforts. We started on a dull afternoon, clothed for rain and mud of which we had been warned we would find plenty. The officers and soldiers with us were ominously silent. We drove swiftly. We commenced to hear cannon. When it was necessary to sound the automobile horn the driver was cautious, and the discreet response gave us a feeling of danger. Already we wondered how individuals, not unlike ourselves, ordered their lives amid such dangers and discomforts.
A famous novelist was with me. He spoke no French, and he was considered of such importance that a member of the Chamber of Deputies who knew his language had been assigned to accompany him.
While the voice of the cannon grew angrier we entered a deserted and shell torn village. Barbed wire filled the gardens. It was stretched across ​ the streets, so that we had to zig-zag a course through. The shattered walls were pierced for rifle and machine guns.
"It won't do to go any farther with the cars," the staff officer said, “The entrance to the communication trench isn't far."
My curiosity increased. I wanted to know exactly what the entrance to a communication trench was like. I fancied that the pictures again would be wrong, and so they were.
We were walking, I remember, along a sidewalk in the shelter of some ruined walls. The sidewalk had a stone curb. Then I understood. The curb line ran level straight ahead, but a portion of the sidewalk, perhaps two feet wide, next to the curb, sloped gently downwards. In a moment we were walking shoulder high in an excavation such as one observes about unruly gas mains. Abruptly we were in the communication line.
The next thing was to know when one was for the first time under fire. The trench stretched diagonally across level fields. It was higher than one's head. It was impossible to see anything except the white mud through which one slipped, and the grass overhanging the edges. The guns were a great deal louder. The officer raised himself cautiously above the bank. I followed his ​ example. There was a railroad embankment ahead, some queer whitish furrows in the distance. One heard curious little gusts of wind. When will we be under fire?" I asked.
The officer grinned.
"Don't get up too high. We have been under fire ever since we left the automobiles. Listen!"
One of the gusts of wind had a sharper sound. "Shells," he said.
I experienced a sensation of nakedness. I was glad when he said:
"We'd better get down."
We walked on through apparently endless lines of trenches with a glimpse at a turning, perhaps, of a bit of brick wall in the shelter of which poilus improvised a meal. In all directions lines branched from the communication we followed. Each was labelled. It was like a hidden city whose inhabitants carried an air of constant expectancy. Covered with mud these creatures slipped by us from time to time.
“How are things in the front line?" our officer would ask.
Fairly quiet," was the almost invariable reply.
"It is the rain," the officer explained to us. Yet it wasn't quiet in the language of any other war. The roar of the guns seemed continuously closer. No minute passed without a number of ​ detonations, and the gusts of wind had a more menacing volubility.
At every turning we found a machine gun emplacement. Directly in front of it was suspended, at approximately the height of a man, a great globe twined of barbed wire, ready to be lowered in the event of an enemy invasion of the trench.
"While they are getting rid of that," our officer said, "the machine gun attends to their little affair."
We came to trenches marked:
"Boyau de la deuxième ligne."
The poilus we met didn't speak above a whisper. We were aware of an empty road winding along the surface of the earth. A flight of steps led upward. It was nearly barred by a huge sign which forbade pedestrians to use the road under the severest penalties.
“You mean to say," I asked, "that soldiers have to be threatened from that exposed place?"
"The communication trench, as you can see, he answered, "is very warm. The men prefer comfort and the German fire. We were losing too many through such foolishness. Even now it is difficult on a warm day to keep them in the communication lines.”
​ “The units leave that way for an attack or a sortie," our officer explained casually.
We glanced at these stairways of death with a vague discomfort, an inability quite to comprehend, and hurried on. We paused before a narrower flight.
"We are just behind the first line," our guide explained. "Now I am going to show you something."
We followed him up the steps into the most amazing garden any of us, I think, had ever seen.
It was hidden on one side by a half-destroyed building, on two others by brick walls, pierced for defence, on the fourth by a low structure which, from a distance, looked as if it might have something to do with the scientific raising of chickens. We entered through the archway of the half-destroyed building. Every one spoke in whispers. Cabbages, artichokes, haricots—such vegetables as a Frenchman enjoys—stretched in neat rows.
"Sometimes they get a trifle too much ploughing," the officer laughed softly. "The Germans, I should think, are not neat farmers, but here they do their work unasked."
We had not, it developed, been brought to see the garden, but its owner and his home. We approached the building which was like a chicken house. It was less than one story high, and the ​ white earth of the country had been firmly packed over its roof.
We went down a flight of steps into a corridor, half subterranean, lined with concrete, from which four doors opened into four long, narrow cells roofed with steel arches, painted white. This, we were told, was the headquarters of that sector. The room to the right was occupied by telephone operators. Next was the commandant's apartment, furnished with a cot bed, a bureau, a washhand-stand, and a chair or two. Touches as homely as the garden were photographs of a woman and two children. Even in these lifeless pictures the faces seemed watchful, apprehensive.
The room next door, occupied by the majors, was much the same, but in the cell at the end of the passage there was a variation. No one had to tell us for what purpose this shelter was used. The sickly ether odour welcomed us. A crucifix was suspended above a bed improvised from three stained, mattresses piled one atop the other. А brown blanket covered it. It, too, was stained with black, wide splotches.
"Poste de Secours," the officer said. "A first aid post, directly at the front, yet thoroughly protected."
The light entered reluctantly. The melancholy of the crucifix oppressed us. As we climbed to ​ the surface again, a small procession crossed the peaceful garden. Through the stooping, slow-paced files we saw a still form on a stretcher. It was covered with a stained blanket.
We turned gladly to follow our guide through the archway and down another flight of steps deep beneath the surface. We emerged into a tunnel-like room crowded with switchboards before which soldier operators sat, smoking and calling into the transmitters. The wires strayed across the ceiling like the web of a gigantic spider. We were told that from this protected cave one could communicate with any portion of the front or with the etat major. From it radiated black passages designed to furnish shelter for hundreds of men. We were permitted only a minute to explore these with a candle, for other plans had been made for us.
"I am going to show you an artillery observation post," the officer said, " if you are not afraid. You will please not speak above a whisper or make any unnecessary noise."
We went at his heels down one of the dark passages.
The only light was an occasional flash from the officer's lamp. He paused at the base of a perpendicular ladder which rose beyond the roof ​ through a narrow shaft until it was lost in the darkness.
"Here we are," the officer said. "You can go up—if you are not afraid."
Now that we were actually at the front that chilling question had become habitual with him. It was possible to do this or that—if we were not afraid.
Such a formula must have its ritual answer. Through the darkness we murmured our delight. While I waited my turn at the ladder a patrol stumbled near, flashed his light on a telephone instrument against the wall, then went close and took down the receiver. I heard him reporting to headquarters.
"Very quiet—Oh, four or five casualties. Sending them back. No, no. Nothing at all. Everything is very peaceable."
He snapped off his light, hung up the receiver, and stumbled away, continuing his routine.
It was my turn. I commenced to climb the ladder while the water dripped with a perpetual animosity. The succession of rungs seemed endless. Certainly we would emerge at some high point with a prospect magnificent and extended; but such a post, it occurred to one, must, to an extent, be exposed. I tried to calculate how high I was already. Then far above light gleamed. ​ The officer had opened a trap door. With muttered warnings to avoid a misstep he helped us through into what might have been a little shelter, roughly constructed and too low, arranged on the summit of some lofty monument. Openings on each side were curtained by dark canvas flaps. The officer closed the trap door. He unfastened the flap in front and raised it.
Look," he whispered. “Our trenches and the Boche!"
But the first thing we saw was grass, and we couldn't understand. Then it came to us. After that climb we were at the level of the ground. The officer smiled.
“But there is a little ridge here and one can see very well. It is necessary to enter that way in order that the enemy may have no suspicion."
For a long time we stared across the slowly waving grass at the routine of war. Not many yards ahead of us was a deep wide fosse. At intervals blue-overcoated forms, holding rifles extended across the parapet, were like statues. A hundred yards beyond them white mounds straggled a parallel course. The interval was a jungle of weeds and barbed wire. A few skeleton trees in the distance stretched their branches in gestures of protest. Poppies, scarlet and significant against the white soil and the dun vegetation, ​ drooped everywhere, even in the jungle of No-Man's Land. There are so many poppies this year in the war zone! They are like great drops of blood.
The perpetual sighing as of wind overhead was accented now and then by tearing screams. The officer looked about uneasily.
"They feel all over the landscape with their shells for these observation posts," he said. He indicated the row of sentinels in the trench just ahead.
Besides, I am going to take you now to the very front line,"
He glanced at us curiously. His face was enigmatic.