"Oh, we'd bury them like Christians if they'd give us another half-crown on our wages. We ain't got nothing agin 'em—specially the dead."
"Do you sleep out here on this battlefield?"
"We bin 'ere six months now."
"No ghosts?"
The man smiled. He saw none. He felt the presence of none. Imagination did not pull his heart-strings. If it did, he would go mad.
Lying in an old trench behold a skull! It is clean and polished—a soldier's head, low and broad at the brows, high at the back. There is a frayed hole in an otherwise perfect cranium. The simplest way to pick it up would be to put a finger in an eye-hole and lift it. You must put both hands together and raise it fearfully if it be the first skull you have ever found.... Friend or foe? Hm—there are no identification marks on this. Thinking anything about it all? No, nothing—long since ceased to think. Friends living? Probably, somewhere. The more you look at the skull the more angry does it seem—it has an intense eternal grievance. This one does not grin, for the mouth has been destroyed. It is just blind and senseless for ever and ever.
Such is the Golgotha of Zandwoorde. Gheluvelt, the other end of the line, has now a diminutive yellow tower of new wood from an improvised church. Kruisseecke is a rusty-roofed, ramshackle, salvage-built settlement on the site of complete ruin. You see the yellow tower of Gheluvelt from all around, and like a livid finger the monument at Polygon Wood is seen far o'er the battlefields pointing to heaven.
In the whole complex story of the battle of Ypres, where so many regiments were engaged in such diverse parts of the field, with all their varying calamities and triumphs, it is only possible to realise the story in glimpses and aperçus. A thousand dramas were being enacted simultaneously in a clamour so great that no neighbour understood what was happening to his neighbour. Tragedy was accomplished, swiftly and as it were privately. A dreadful way of speaking was begotten afterwards, and men said "He got his at Polygon Wood," or "he got his at the Château," or "his at Kruisseecke."