While we go forth to other work upon another field.
They'll cook the big brown Flemish loaves and tend the oven fire,
And while they do the daily toil of barn and bench and byre
They'll think of hearty fellows gone and sigh for them in vain
The billet boys, the khaki lads who won't return again.
[CHAPTER IV]
MONT ST. QUENTIN
It was on the bank of the Somme Canal in the early morning, Peronne in the distance, and a light railway track at our feet. The place was Brie. We had arrived there the previous night.
The railway track was torn and twisted, rails sticking into the air at oblique angles, sleepers charred, chairs smashed, the bed of the four-foot way churned and broken, with the waggons and trucks which once ran along them smashed to fragments, thrown hither and thither, out into the canal on the right or into the fields on the left side of the line. Looking at the riverscape one could see in the near distance a broken bridge with the sluggish water rippling lazily round the buttresses which yet remained, and near at hand, though the day was chilly, three naked soldiers stood on a boat making ready to dive into the oily water.