Under the ardent sun, with the dry mud colour which pervaded everything, the outlines of the Algerian sharp-shooters, their bronzed complexions and their eagle-like profiles reminded one of an Oriental street.
One can have no idea of modern warfare without having seen the ground all torn up by shells and hollowed out in all directions by trenches, with the old communication passages of the Germans cutting ours perpendicularly. Houses, the road, gardens, fields are all mixed up in one mass of ruin and broken earth. It is no use expecting to find here that comfort which embellishes calmer war zones; it is useless to look for tombs all regularly arranged and covered with grass, each one with a cross, on which the dead man's name is written in white letters.
Here and there, in this region, a rusty bayonet emerges, and on it is a tattered military cap. Two sticks joined together to form a cross may also be seen now and then, but that is all. And yet, under this ground, there are heaps and heaps of dead bodies buried haphazard. The sharp-shooters have taken some of them for consolidating their parapet. Cellars fell in burying their occupants. On every side there are whiffs of strong odours. The ground moves under our feet and whenever one treads in muddy puddles, this odour is still stronger. The wind of Death has passed. Everything is destroyed here, and even the grass does not grow again in such spots.
Lizerne
(June, 1915)
By Dr. Duwez, Army Surgeon to the Regiment of Grenadiers
We were walking along the winding attack trench, skirting the Yperlée. It is a trench that gradually gets more and more shallow. Just where it ends, the dead bodies of two French soldiers were lying, their faces black and unrecognisable. Water was running over the injured thigh of one of them and his flesh was as red as his trousers. The brook among the wild grasses was full of rubbish of all sorts; and the tall trees sheltering it were either headless, or they had been mown down, and were lying shattered on the ground. Some of the branches had resprouted and the muddy brooklet, in which mouldy bread and tins of provisions were floating, continued to flow slowly on. Polluted, but glorious, it went on over crumbling tree trunks and improvised bridges, past earth shelters and mud banks towards archways that, in the distance, appear to be covered with flowers. It was flowing on towards that old gay, laughing valley, little known formerly, but which now bears the charming and terrible name of the "covered road of the Yperlée."