The bystander. [volume] (Des Moines, Iowa) 1916-1922, 1916-10-06

With STOPPING heads, the sentries re
port nothing doing" That means
nothing visible, nothing audible.
Peering over the parapet for a mo
ment you see only wilderness OF
bare earth, pitted thickly with conica'
holes from three to eight feet deep
Four hundred feet away is the skele'
ton of dead village. No sign Of life
is to be seen there except perhaps one
of the larks which sing cheerfully
through cannOnades that would make
the pheasantS in faraway Sussex nerv-
Gus, or else big hawk slowly quarter
ing around and sending the larks into
a retirement as modest as that of Ger
man air men. And yet you know that
that waste is infested; that you need
only to raise your head Il foot higher
to bring a bullet dipping itself with
quiet flick into the loose earth behind
you; that if you crawled out on your
stomach and peeped over the edge OF
each shell hole you reached you would
come at last to one in which men in
wide-skirted gray tunics with narrow
bands round their caps were crouchlng,
some of them nursing their one good
friend, q machine gun. some of them
digging hard to connect hole with hole
till a row of fortuitous dots is turned
into a line; some of them resting
tucked into little cavities scooped in
the earth or near the side wall of q
quarry, and staring apprehensively up
at bomb-laden British biplanes wheel
ing about in the sky overhead as the
larks in the grass look up at hawk.
Kindness Surprises captives.
You know all this, because on the
way up this morning you talked with
number of Prussian and Saxon pris-
oners in one of the cages at the little
camps where the latest captives rest
for some days out of range of their
friends heavy guns till they can be
sent by train to the base or to Eng
land. Three days ago they came down
broken-hearted To the cage, their faces
lined and drawn with mental over
strain. some of them still mechanical-
~ making deprec;ltOry gestures of sur
render and entreaty. AS they marched
today all the lines We're SnOOthed out.
They had been fed and had slept for
whole nights. and had found that the
"murderers'' described to them by
their own Sergeants inflicted nothing
but offers of cigarettes. SO they be-
gan to expand in the unexpected sun
shine Of. good treatment and they told
what life had been like in the she'll
holes. its good points and its bad. The
food it had been good. but sometimes
it did not come because the British
guns would draw Il kind of fence of
falling shrapncl across piece of
country. sort of shOwerbath of bull
lets dropping along the line. so nobody
| could cross the line without being hurt.
Still the bread and meat and chocolate.
when they did come, We're good and
the water was sometimes mineral VII
ter in bottles. The trouble WAS that
the British guns would not cease fir
ing and the British aerop!anes would
not go away. nor the> German ones
come out of their sheds.
Sometimes the men in the shelhOle
| would see British troops in the open
within rifle range, but would not dare
shoot lest British airmen should see
where they We're and send word to a
British gun and bring down high eX-
plosive shell on the old shellhole to
bury them all alive by a second rear
rangement Of the earth. You perceive
this apprehension just because you
twice today have seen the eDd of a
stiff black-booted leg plotl,dfng out of
the wall of an old shellhOle.
Other questions about their life at
the front the prisoners answered as
freely. Had they talked politics? Yes,
there were any number Of Social Dem
ocrats in the army and every one
thought great changes would come
when the war was over, but not now.
Were there any assertions? No.
Many men would be glad to be prs-
oners but would not desert. Many
more still would surrender if the Ger
man. officers were not so quick to shoot
men who put up their hands, and if
all the German soldiers knew that the
allies did not kill prisoners nor have
them scalped by savages. II Fl"
Strain on German Nerves.
Those, tken, are the kind Of men,
and that is the kind Of life and state
Of mind which exist beyond the 300
Intervening wards of blank ground. On