We go out often as working parties or listening patrols.
From Souchez to Ypres the firing line runs through a land of stinking drains, level fields, and shattered villages. We know those villages, we have lived in them, we have been sniped at in their streets and shelled in the houses. We have had men killed in them, blown to atoms or buried in masonry, done to death by some damnable instrument of war.
In our trenches near Souchez you can see the eternal artillery fighting on the hills of Lorette, up there men are flicked out of existence like flies in a hailstorm. The big straight road out of a village runs through our lines into the German trenches and beyond. The road is lined with poplars and green with grass; by day you can see the German sandbags from our trenches, by night you can hear the wind in the trees that bend towards one another as if in conversation. There is no whole house in the place; chimneys have been blown down and roofs are battered by shrapnel. But few of the people have gone away, they have become schooled in the process of accommodation, and accommodate themselves to a woeful change. They live with one foot on the top step of the cellar stairs, a shell sends them scampering down; they sleep there, they eat there, in their underground home they wait for the war to end. The men who are too old to fight labour in a neighbouring mine, which still does some work although its chimney is shattered and its coal waggons are scraps of wood and iron on broken rails. There are many graves by the church, graves of our boys, civilians' graves, children's graves, all victims of war. Children are there still, merry little kids with red lips and laughing eyes.
One day, when staying in the village, I met one, a dainty little dot, with golden hair and laughing eyes, a pink ribbon round a tress that hung roguishly over her left cheek. She smiled at me as she passed where I sat on the roadside under the poplars, her face was an angel's set in a disarray of gold. In her hand she carried an empty jug, almost as big as herself and she was going to her home, one of the inhabited houses nearest the fighting line. The day had been a very quiet one and the village took an opportunity to bask in the sun. I watched her go up the road tripping lightly on the grass, swinging her big jug. Life was a garland of flowers for her, it was good to watch her to see her trip along; the sight made me happy. What caused the German gunner, a simple woodman and a father himself perhaps, to fire at that moment? What demon guided the shell? Who can say? The shell dropped on the roadway just where the child was; I saw the explosion and dropped flat to avoid the splinters, when I looked again there was no child, no jug, where she had been was a heap of stones on the grass and dark curls of smoke rising up from it. I hastened indoors; the enemy were shelling the village again.
Our billet is a village with shell-scarred trees lining its streets, and grass peeping over its fallen masonry, a few inn signs still swing and look like corpses hanging; at night they creak as if in agony. This place was taken from the Germans by the French, from the French by the Germans and changed hands several times afterwards. The streets saw many desperate hand to hand encounters; they are clean now but the village stinks, men were buried there by cannon, they lie in the cellars with the wine barrels, bones, skulls, fleshless hands sticking up over the bricks; the grass has been busy in its endeavour to cloak up the horror, but it will take nature many years to hide the ravages of war.
In another small village three kilometres from the firing line I have seen the street so thick with flies that it was impossible to see the cobbles underneath. There we could get English papers the morning after publication: for penny papers we paid three halfpence, for halfpenny papers twopence! In a restaurant in the place we got a dinner consisting of vegetable soup, fried potatoes, and egg omelette, salad, bread, beer, a sweet and a cup of café au lait for fifteen sous per man. There too on a memorable occasion we were paid the sum of ten francs on pay day.
In a third village not far off six of us soldiers slept one night in a cellar with a man, his wife and seven children, one a sucking babe. That night the roof of the house was blown in by a shell. In the same place my mate and I went out to a restaurant for dinner, and a young Frenchman, a gunner, sat at our table. He came from the south, a shepherd boy from the foot hills of the Pyrenees. He shook hands with us, giving the left hand, the one next the heart, as a proof of comradeship when leaving. A shrapnel bullet caught him inside the door and he fell dead on the pavement. Every stone standing or fallen in the villages by the firing line has got a history, and a tragedy connected with it.
In some places the enemy's bullets search the main street by night and day; a journey from the rear to the trenches is made across the open, and the eternal German bullet never leaves off searching for our boys coming in to the firing line. You can rely on sandbagged safety in the villages, but on the way from there to the trenches you merely trust your luck; for the moment your life has gone out of your keeping.
No civilian is allowed to enter one place, but I have seen a woman there. We were coming in, a working party, from the trenches when the colour of dawn was in the sky. We met her on the street opposite the pile of bricks that once was a little church: the spire of the church was blown off months ago and it sticks point downwards in a grave. The woman was taken prisoner. Who was she? Where did she come from? None of us knew, but we concluded she was a spy. Afterwards we heard that she was a native who had returned to have a look at her home.
We were billeted at the rear of the village on the ground floor of a cottage. Behind our billet was the open country where Nature, the great mother, was busy; the butterflies flitted over the soldiers' graves, the grass grew over unburied dead men, who seemed to be sinking into the ground, apple trees threw out a wealth of blossom which the breezes flung broadcast to earth like young lives in the whirlwind of war. We first came to the place at midnight; in the morning when we got up we found outside our door, in the midst of a jumble of broken pump handles and biscuit tins, fragments of chairs, holy pictures, crucifixes and barbed wire entanglements, a dead dog dwindling to dust, the hair falling from its skin and the white bones showing. As we looked on the thing it moved, its belly heaved as if the animal had gulped in a mouthful of air. We stared aghast and our laughter was not hearty when a rat scurried out of the carcase and sought safety in a hole of the adjoining wall. The dog was buried by the Section 3. Four simple lines serve as its epitaph:—