We have had rain. Moving in opposite directions, the two streams of the traffic plough up the road. Commissariat lorries, motor ambulances, artillery ammunition wagons, despatch riders, the motor-cars of the Staff, and then, in the middle of this mad torrent of traffic, some country gig, creeping along at a jog-trot. The roads are a river of mud. We wallow in it frantically; we drown in unsuspected lakes. We suffer the modern equivalent of the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. At once we find ourselves being changed into clumsy statues of clay. It is not more cars that are needed to get forward, but those Venetian boats that glide along the canals before the strokes of a curved oar.
One does get on, however. And here we are at Albert already.
Ah! these little towns of Picardy! The German shells have no surprises left for them. Their houses gutted from roof to cellar, their churches that the guns have chiselled to new shapes, their farms that have neither roof nor wall, and seem, with their bare beams, like huge empty cages—these sorrows no longer count. Yesterday Albert was once again bombarded. What of it? The fronts of a few more houses have crumbled into dust. The great golden Virgin, who, 100 feet in the air, leans with crossed arms from her belfry over the ruined town, has fallen forwards at a rather dizzier angle!
12. A MINE CRATER.
As in London or Paris, the police direct the traffic at the cross-ways and the corners of the lanes. The streets have been re-christened of late. One reads: "Oxford Street," "Cannon Street." We are here in the heart of the war zone. And in this strange country our little old French towns rub their eyes in wonder to find themselves, heretofore so insignificant, now in the very moment of their utter destruction, wakened to share the dignity of capitals.
Still more miles of mud. We leave the road and, with the heavy gait of sewer-men, move through the fields.
Far ahead, on the winding ridges, we see great white marks, like the letter "Y." They are the German trenches, dug in the solid chalk at the beginning of the offensive. It is as if someone had made chalk drawings on those slopes to amuse the aeroplanes. In front, following their lines, are walls of sand-bags, so high and so deep that they appear to be a citadel: the English trenches. It is a stiff climb. We hop from puddle to puddle like sparrows. Everywhere the earth is in heaps. Holes filled with water—shell-holes, you understand—have turned the whole place into a chessboard of sunken squares. Here, there and everywhere, sole lords of this "No Man's Land," stand the shells of the two-hundred-and-tens or the two-hundred-and-forties, like terminal gods, red painted. But the real surprise still awaits us.
Here may I ask you to recall to your most particular remembrance the landscapes of the Moon as Wells and Jules Verne have pictured them for us. Or if chance has offered you the privilege of leaning over the lip of Etna or Vesuvius, summon now your best recollections of the experience. We are on the threshold of a chaos for whose description the tongue of man is poorly equipped.
A plateau, according to the geographers, is a dome, flattened or rounded, in the direction of Heaven; these plateaux, as war constructs them, are gulfs that lead down towards hell. Over hundreds of yards between the opposing trenches surges a sea of vast funnels. One stands amazed before them as before those abysses which open at one's feet among the Alps. Here the destructive genius of man has nothing to learn from the dreadful wrath of Nature.