The Glory of the Coming by Irvin S. Cobb

SEEKING for the thrills that experience had taught me would nevertheless probably not be forthcoming anywhere in this so-called quiet sector, I went that same day with a young American officer to a forward post of command, which was another name for a screened pit dug in the scalp of a fair-sized hillock, immediately behind our foremost rifle pits. Sitting here upon the tops of our steel helmets, which the same make fairly good perches to sit on when the ground is muddied, we could look through periscope glasses right into the courtyard of a wrecked chateau held by the enemy. Upon this spot some of the guns behind us were playing industriously. We could see where the shells struck -- now in the garden, now near the shattered outbuildings, now ripping away a slice of the front walls or a segment of the roof of the chateau itself; and we could see too, after the dust of each hit had somewhat lifted, the small gray figures of Germans scurrying about like startled ants.

A mile away, about, were those Germans, and yet to all intents and purposes they might have been twenty miles away; for as things stood, and with the forces that they had at this point, it would have taken them days or perhaps weeks to bridge the gap between their lines and ours, and it would have taken us as long to get to where they were. For you see both forces had abundance of artillery, but each was holding its front lines with small groups of infantry. To sit there and peer into their defences was like looking into a distant planet peopled by men thinking different thoughts from ours, and swayed by different ambitions and moved by impulses all running counter to those of our breed.