She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile. Poor chateaux of France! German shells came to knock down their painted turrets, to smash through the ceilings where the rosy Cupids played, and in one hour or two to ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of pride.
Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of brick-dust and twisted iron.
I saw the ruins of the Chateau de Henencourt two years after my first visit there. The enemy's line had come closer to it and it was a target for their guns. Our guns—heavy and light—were firing from the back yard and neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Shells had already broken the roofs and turrets of the chateau and torn away great chunks of wall. A colonel of artillery had his headquarters in the petit salon. His hand trembled as he greeted me.
“I'm not fond of this place,” he said. “The whole damn thing will come down on my head at any time. I think I shall take to the cellars.”
We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the way down to the vault. A shell came over the chateau and burst in the outhouses.
“They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago,” said the colonel. “Made a mess of some heavy gunners.”
There was a sense of imminent death about us, but it was not so sinister a place as farther on, where a brother of mine sat in a hole directing his battery... The Countess of Henencourt had gone. She went away with her dairymaids, driving her cattle down the roads.
XII
One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the salient it seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy but a little undergrowth—and the queerest part of it all was the sense of safety, the ridiculously false security with which one could wander about the village and up the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that one's movements were being watched by German eyes and that the whole place could be blown off the face of the earth... but for the convenient fact that the Germans, who were living in the village of Curlu, beyond the footpath, were under our own observation and at the mercy of our own guns.