The tunneï (sape) began in the third line, at a door hi the wall of the trench strongly framed in wooden beams the size of railroad ties. At occasional intervals along the passage the roof was reinforced by a frame of these beams, so that the sape had the businesslike, professional look of a gallery in a coal mine. Descending steeply to a point twelve feet beyond the entrance, it then went at a gentle incline under No Man's Land, and ended beneath the German trenches. It was the original intention to blow up part of the German first line, but it being one day discovered that the Germans were building a tunnel parallel to the French one, it was decided to blow up the French safe so that the explosion would spend its force underground, and cause the walls of the German tunnel to cave in on its makers. I happened to see the tunnel the morning of the day it was blown up. The French had stopped working for fear of being overheard by the Germans. It was a ticklish situation. Were the Germans aware of the French tunnel? If so, they would blow up their own at once. Were they still continuing their labor? The earth of the French might burst apart anyminute and rain down again in a dreadful shower of clods, stones, and mangled bodies. Alone, quiet, at the end of the passage under the German lines sat an old poilu, the sentinel of the tunnel. He was an old coal miner of the North. The light of a candle showed his quiet, bearded face, grave as the countenance of some sculptured saint on the portico of a Gothic church, and revealed the wrinkles and lines of many years of labor. The sentinel held a microphone to his ears; the poles of it disappearing into the wall of damp earth separating us from the Boches. Hippolyte whispered, "You hear them?" The old man nodded his head, and gave the microphone to his officer. I saw Hippolyte listen. Then, without a word, he handed it to me. All that I could hear was a faint tapping. "The Boches," whispered Hippolyte. The French blew up the sape early in the afternoon, at a time when they felt sure the Germans were at work in their tunnel. I saw the result the next day. A saucer-shaped depression about twenty-five feet in diameter, and perhaps two feet deep, had appeared in No Man's Land. Even the stumps of two trees had sunk and tilted. It was Hippolyte who had turned on the electricity. I once talked the matter over with him. He became at once intense, Latin, doctrinaire. "How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have to do?" "I do not have to reconcile my theories to my office; I am furthering my theories." "How so?" "By combating the Boches. Without them we might have realized our idea of universal peace and fraternity. Voilà l'ennemi! The race is a poisonous race, serpents, massacreurs! I wish I could smother as many of them every day as I did yesterday."