On the left was a church. Contrary to orders I spent an hour in the dusk of the first evening in the ruined pile. The place had been shelled for seven months, not a day had passed when it was not struck in some part. The sacristy was a jumble of prayer books, vestments, broken rosaries, crucifixes, and pictures. An ink pot and pen lay on a broken table beside a blotting pad. A lamp which once hung from the roof was beside them, smashed to atoms. In the church the altar railing was twisted into shapeless bars of iron, bricks littered the altar steps, the altar itself even, and bricks, tiles, and beams were piled high in the body of the church.
Outside in the graveyard the graves lay open and the bones of the dead were scattered broadcast over the green grass. Crosses were smashed or wrenched out of the ground and flung to earth; near the Keep was the soldiers' cemetery, the resting place of French, English, Indian, and German soldiers. Many of the French had bottles of holy water placed on their graves under the crosses. The English epitaphs were short and concise, always the same in manner: "Private 999 J. Smith, 26th London Battalion, killed in action 1st March, 1915." And under it stamped on a bronze plate was the information, "Erected by the Mobile Unit (B.R.C.S.) to preserve the record found on the spot." Often the dead man's regiment left a token of remembrance, a bunch of flowers, the dead man's cap or bayonet and rifle (these two latter only if they had been badly damaged when the man died). Many crosses had been taken from the churchyard and placed over these men. One of them read, "A notre dévote fille," and another, "To my beloved mother."
Several Indians, men of the Bengal Mountain Battery, were buried here. A woman it was stated, had disclosed their location to the enemy, and the billet in which they were staying was struck fair by a high explosive shell. Thirty-one were killed. They were now at rest—Anaytullah, Lakhasingh, and other strange men with queer names under the crosses fashioned from biscuit boxes. On the back of Anaytullah's cross was the wording in black: "Biscuits, 50 lbs."
Thus the environment of the Keep: the enemy's trenches were about eight hundred yards away. No fighting took place here, the men's rifles stood loaded, but no shot was fired; only when the front line was broken, if that ever took place, would the defenders of the Keep come into play and hold the enemy back as long as that were possible. Then when they could no longer hold out, when the foe pressed in on all sides, there was something still to do, something vitally important which would cost the enemy many lives, and, if a miracle did not happen, something which would wipe out the defenders for ever. This was the Keep.
The evening was very quiet; a few shells flew wide overhead, and now and again stray bullets pattered against the masonry. We cooked our food in the yard, and, sitting down amidst the flowers, we drank our tea and ate our bread and jam. The first flies were busy, they flew amidst the flower-beds and settled on our jam. Mervin told a story of a country where he had been in, and where the flies were legion and ate the eyes out of horses. The natives there wore corks hung by strings from their caps, and these kept the flies away.
"How?" asked Bill.
"The corks kept swinging backwards and forwards as the men walked," said Mervin. "Whenever a cork struck a fly it dashed the insect's brains out."
"Blimey!" cried Bill, then asked, "What was the most wonderful thing you ever seen, Mervin?"
"The most wonderful thing," repeated Mervin. "Oh, I'll tell you. It was the way they buried the dead out in Klondike. The snow lies there for six months and it's impossible to dig, so when a man died they sharpened his toes and drove him into the earth with a mallet."
"I saw a more wonderful thing than that, and it was when we lay in the barn at Richebourg," said Bill, who was referring to a comfortless billet and a cold night which were ours a month earlier. "I woke up about midnight 'arf asleep. I 'ad my boots off and I couldn't 'ardly feel them I was so cold. 'Blimey!' I said, 'on goes my understandin's, and I 'ad a devil of a job lacing my boots up. When I thought I 'ad them on I could 'ear someone stirrin' on the left. It was my cotmate. 'Wot's yer gime?' he says. 'Wot gime?' I asks. 'Yer foolin' about with my tootsies,' he says. Then after a minute 'e shouts, 'Damn it ye've put on my boots,' So I 'ad, put on his blessed boots and laced them mistaking 'is feet for my own."