There were no men in the trench where we stood; those who would man it in case of danger were in the adjoining woods, where they had only to cut down saplings and make shelters to be as comfortable as in a winter resort camp in the Adirondacks. Any minute they might receive a call-- which meant death for many. But they were used to that, and their card games went on none the less merrily. “No farther?” we asked our major. “No farther!” he said. “This is risk enough for you. It looks very peaceful, but the enemy could toss in some _marmites_ if it pleased him.” Perhaps he was exaggerating the risk for the sake of a realistic effect on the sightseers. No matter! In time one was to have risks enough in trenches. It was on such an occasion as this, on another part of the French line, that two correspondents slipped away from the officers conducting them, though their word of honour was given not to do so--which adds another reason for military suspicion of the press. The officers rang up the nearest telephone which connected with the front trenches, the batteries, and regimental and brigade headquarters, to apprehend two men of such-and-such description. They were taken as easily as a one-eyed, one-eared man, with a wooden leg and red hair, would be in trying to get out of police headquarters when the doorman had his Bertillon photograph and measurements to go by. That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up its slow firing at intervals. It was “bothering” one of the German trenches. Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and so easy for the gunners. They had only to slip in a shell, swing a breechlock home, and pull a lanyard. The German guns did not respond because they could not locate the French battery. They may have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a four-leafed clover on the lawn below.