In some regions rents must be extraordinarily low.
While he slept, firing was resumed at points on the long double line.
Rifles flashed, and incautious heads or hands were struck, and somewhere or other the cannon were always muttering.

But it was all in the day's work.

Months of it had made his whole system physical and mental so used to it that it did not awaken him now.
Nevertheless the hosts of the air were uncommonly active while he slept.
The wireless, sputtering and crackling, was carrying the news from general to general that a smart little action had been fought at Chastel, where another smart little action had been fought not long before, that the Germans had been overly daring and had paid for it.
Yet it was only an incident on a gigantic battle front that extended its mighty curving line from Switzerland to the sea, and soon the wireless and its older brother the telephone, and its oldest brother the telegraph, talked of other plans which would cause a much greater slaughter than at Chastel.

Chastel itself, unless its beautiful Gothic cathedral brooding unharmed over the ruins could win it a word or two, would have no place at all in history.

John himself was only one among eight or ten million armed men, and not a single one of all those millions knew that he lay there in the snow under the hedge.
The aeroplanes came out in the clear frosty blue, and both German and French machines sauntered lazily up and down the air lanes, but they did not risk encounters with one another.