A hundred years ago, the French soldier Albert Hugues wrote from the trenches near Reims:
Sometimes even the night birds visited us, and the play of the searchlights, the flash of the rockets were part of a nocturnal spectacle these birds had grown used to.
One night around midnight, the sole sentinel of a small patrol positioned in front of the trenches and 200 meters from the enemy line, I was visited by an owl, which perched on a tree 15 meters from my patrol’s place. The bird stayed for a good ten minutes, and neither the shots fired from the enemy trenches nor the heavy tread of the men on watch atop the concrete walls disturbed the bird at its own watch post; the owl was the only witness to my own vigilance and faithfulness to my duty.
