"Souvenirs?" I asked.
"Souvenirs," he replied.
The two of us slipped away from the platoon and entered the building. On the ground floor stood a table on which a dinner was laid; an active service dinner of soup made from soup tablets (2d. each) the wrappers of which lay on the tiled floor, some tins of bully beef, opened, a loaf, half a dozen apples and an unopened tin of café au lait. The dinner was laid for four, although there were only three forks, two spoons and two clasp knives, the latter were undoubtedly used to replace table knives. Pryor looked under the table, then turned round and fixed a pair of scared eyes on me, and beckoned to me to approach. I came to his side and saw under the table on the floor a human hand, severed from the arm at the wrist. Beside it lay a web-equipment, torn to shreds, a broken range-finder and a Webley revolver, long of barrel and heavy of magazine.
"A souvenir," said Pryor. "It must have been some time since that dinner was made; the bully smells like anything."
"The shell came in there," I said pointing at the window, the side of which was broken a little, "and it hit one poor beggar anyway. Nobody seems to have come in here since then."
"We'll hide the revolver," Pryor remarked, "and we'll come here for it to-night."
We hid the revolver behind the door in a little cupboard in the wall; we came back for it two days later, but the weapon was gone though the hand still lay on the floor. What was the history of that house and of the officers who sat down to dinner? Will the tragedy ever be told?
I had an interesting experience near Souchez when our regiment was holding part of the line in that locality. On the way in was a single house, a red brick villa, standing by the side of the communication trench which I used to pass daily when I went out to get water from the carts at the rear. One afternoon I climbed over the side and entered the house by a side door that looked over the German lines. The building was a conspicuous target for the enemy, but strange to say, it had never been touched by shell fire; now and again bullets peppered the walls, chipped the bricks and smashed the window-panes. On the ground floor was a large living-room with a big-bodied stove in the centre of the floor, religious pictures hung on the wall, a grandfather's clock stood in the niche near the door, the blinds were drawn across the shattered windows, and several chairs were placed round a big table near the stove. Upstairs in the bedrooms the beds were made and in one apartment a large perambulator, with a doll flung carelessly on its coverlet, stood near the wall, the paper of which was designed in little circles and in each circle were figures of little boys and girls, hundreds of them, frivolous mites, absurd and gay.
Another stair led up to the garret, a gloomy place bare under the red tiles, some of which were broken. Looking out through the aperture in the roof I could see the British and German trenches drawn as if in chalk on a slate of green by an erratic hand, the hand of an idle child. Behind the German trenches stood the red brick village of ——, with an impudent chimney standing smokeless in the air, and a burning mine that vomited clouds of thick black smoke over meadow-fields splashed with poppies. Shells were bursting everywhere over the grass and the white lines; the greenish grey fumes of lyddite, the white smoke of shrapnel rose into mid-air, curled away and died. On the left of the village a road ran back into the enemy's land, and from it a cloud of dust was rising over the tree-tops; no doubt vehicles of war which I could not see were moving about in that direction. I stayed up in that garret for quite an hour full of the romance of my watch and when I left I took my souvenir with me, a picture of the Blessed Virgin in a cedar frame. That night we placed it outside our dug-out over the door. In the morning we found it smashed to pieces by a bullet.
Daily I spent some time in the garret on my way out to the water-cart; and one day I found it occupied. Five soldiers and an officer were standing at my peephole when I got up, with a large telescope fixed on a tripod and trained on the enemy's lines. The War Intelligence Department had taken over the house for an observation post.