"Months of boredom punctuated by moments of intense fright" is a definition of war which undoubtedly Noah would have regarded as a chestnut. And I should think it doubtful if there has ever been a war in which this definition was more correct.
Jim route marched: he trained bombers: he dined in Poperinghe and went to the Follies. Also, he allowed other men to talk to him of their plans for leave: than which no more beautiful form of unselfishness is laid down anywhere in the Law or the Prophets.
On the whole the time did not drag. There is much of interest for those who have eyes to see in that country which fringes the Cock Pit of Europe. Hacking round quietly most afternoons on a horse borrowed from someone, the spirit of the land got into him, that blood-soaked, quiet, uncomplaining country, whose soul rises unconquerable from the battered ruins.
Horses exercising, lorries crashing and lurching over the pavé roads. G.S. wagons at the walk, staff motors—all the necessary wherewithal to preserve the safety of the mud holes up in front—came and went in a ceaseless procession; while every now and then a local cart with mattresses and bedsteads, tables and crockery, tied on perilously with bits of string, would come creaking past—going into the unknown, leaving the home of years.
Ypres, that tragic charnel house, with the great jagged holes torn out of the pavé; with the few remaining walls of the Cathedral and Cloth Hall cracked and leaning outwards; with the strange symbolical touch of the black hearse which stood untouched in one of the arches. Rats everywhere, in the sewers and broken walls; in the crumbling belfry above birds, cawing discordantly. The statue of the old gentleman which used to stand serene and calm amidst the wreckage, now lay broken on its face. But the stench was gone—the dreadful stench of death which had clothed it during the second battle; it was just a dead town—dead and decently buried in great heaps of broken brick....
Vlamertinghe, with the little plot of wooden crosses by the cross roads; Elverdinghe, where the gas first came, and the organ pipes lay twisted in the wreckage of the unroofed church; where the long row of French graves rest against the château wall, graves covered with long grass—each with an empty bottle upside down at their head.
And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests star-scatter'd on the Grass,
... turn down an empty Glass.
And in the family archives are some excellent reproductions—not photographs of course, for the penalty for carrying a camera is death at dawn—of ruined churches and shell-battered châteaux. Perhaps the most interesting one, at any rate the most human, is a "reproduction" of a group of cavalry men. They had been digging in a little village a mile behind the firing-line—a village battered and dead from which the inhabitants had long since fled. Working in the garden of the local doctor, they were digging a trench which ran back to the cellar of the house, when on the scene of operations had suddenly appeared the doctor himself. By signs he possessed himself of a shovel, and, pacing five steps from the kitchen door and three from the tomato frame, he too started to dig.
"His wife's portrait, probably," confided the cavalry officer to Jim, as they watched the proceeding. "Or possibly an urn with her ashes."