CALM BEFORE THE STORM.

From PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS (France), Friday.

The hush before the storm! Here and there along our front for an hour or two of uproar, the enemy’s guns are flinging over shell-fire, very fierce and concentrated while it lasts, and our guns are answering or shooting before the challenge with the same sudden gusts of fury. But there is nothing systematic in this. It is not the beginning of those great bombardments which precede infantry battles on a wide front after the massing of many batteries. It is only the harassing fire of winter warfare, and there still reigns over our battlefields a strange, unearthly silence between these bouts of shooting. It has seemed to me during the last few days when I have been up at the front as though Nature herself were in suspense, waiting and watching and listening for the beginning of that conflict of men which is expected before the year grows much older – perhaps before the first crocus thrusts up through the moist leaves, and before there is the first glint of green in the woods. Yesterday it was immensely quiet again along that part of the line where I happened to be. We could see the enemy’s country stretching out before us, slope melting into slope through the mists of the day, and one hill, naked of trees at the top, stark and bluff against the sky, dominating our own countryside with direct observation.

There were mined villages on the enemy’s side of the line like those on ours. Somewhere in the folds of earth were his guns, and nearer to us the hidden emplacements of his machineguns, and below ground in their dug-outs his men. A menace was there and a secret – the menace of death, the secret of the enemy’s plans, but everywhere that strange silence. Not a gun fired for an hour or more, not a rifle shot. Life seemed to have gone from this land. Nothing moved. No bird sang in the thickets. No smoke curled from the chimneys of villages still standing behind the German lines. It was all dead and still. Only the wind stirred in the rank grass that grows over old wheat fields, and a little tremor of life in the wet earth and the trees that are waiting for the spring. In this hush the very wind, soft and warm yesterday over these battlefields, seemed to bold its breath, expectant of the thing that one day soon will break the spell of silence and shock the sky with noise. Some men of ours came winding over a grassy track to a pile of old ruins on a high slope. After their march they sat down in a ditch with their packs against a broken wall and lit their cigarettes at the journey’s end not far from the enemy. “WHAT WILL THE ENEMY DO?“

An officer came and stood by my side and looked over the enemy’s lines. “When is this battle going to begin?” he asked, by way of opening the conversation. I said, “What battle? It looks as though the war had ended.” “Yes,” he answered with a queer smile in his eyes, “I have seen this sort of thing before. It’s what you might call the hush before the storm.” He was with a company of London men relieving another crowd. “Write something good about us,” said one of them with a grin, and I said, “I’m always writing something good about you, because I come from the same old town, and because you have done as well as we all knew you would.” “Well, don’t forget the London Rangers,” said the boy.