of night. During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off
from any connection with the world behind them. Food, cooked miles away,
came up at night, cold and unappetizing. For water, having exhausted
their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them, ill-
smelling and reeking of fever. Water carts trundled forward at night,
but often they were far too few.
The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety,
had been trained to fight. In a way they had been trained to fight a
losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on
the east. But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all,
condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy
artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the
courage of a less desperate people.
To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a
fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy
that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea,
spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where
fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in
unfordable wallows of mud and water.
Henri then, knowing all this--none better--had his first question to
settle, which was this: As spring advanced the flood had commenced to
recede. Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind
the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort. In the deeper
ones, the bottom of the trench appeared for the first time.
On a day previous, however, the water had commenced to come back. There
had been no rain, but little by little in a certain place yellow,
ill-smelling little streams began to flow sluggishly into the trenches.
Seeped, rather than flowed. At first the Belgian officers laid it to
that bad luck that had so persistently pursued them. Then they held a
conference in the small brick house with its maps and its pine tables
and its picture of an American harvester on the wall, which was now
headquarters.
Sitting under the hanging lamp, with an orderly making coffee at a stove
in the corner, they talked it over. Henri was there, silent before his
elders, but intently listening. And at last they turned to him.
"I can go and find out," he said quietly. "It is possible, though I do
not see how." He smiled. "They are, I think, only drying themselves at
our expense. It is a bit of German humor."
But the cry of "Calais in a month!" was in the air, and undoubtedly there
had been renewed activity along the German Front near the sea. The
second question to be answered was dependent on the first.
Had the Germans, as Henri said, merely shifted the water, by some clever
engineering, to the Belgian trenches, or was there some bigger thing on
hand? What, for instance, if they were about to attempt to drain the
inundation, smash the Belgian line, and march by the Dunkirk road to
Calais?
So, that night while Henri jested about Pierre's right elbow and watched
Sara Lee for a smile, he had difficult work before him.