LXXI
RUINS NEAR ARRAS
Landscape near Arras is like the biblical vine hanging over a wall—“All the archers have shot at her.” Injured, but not yet destroyed, the woods seem like creatures scared, as if the trees themselves were possessed with the disquiet of dryads crouching somewhere in hiding. Many different parts of the front have their own almost personal expression, but it is seldom one of fear. At and around Arras this expression of alarm is so curiously strong that, if he transgressed prose, the visitor might fancy the taut bulrushes were nature’s hair standing on end, and a slight stir in the poplars her shudder. By some means, which a layman cannot mark down, Mr. Bone has suffused his drawing with his own sense of the tragic queerness of this vacuous and unnerved landscape.
LXXII
ON THE SOMME: IN THE OLD NO MAN’S LAND
High ground near “King George’s Hill,” whence the King viewed the main battlefield of 1916; the drawing shows this in the distance. The foreground was won last July by the Manchesters. They found in No Man’s Land the bodies of many Frenchmen killed in earlier fighting, and buried them beside their own dead. Not all the bodies could be identified: Some of the crosses shown in the drawing bear such inscriptions as “In honoured Memory of Two Unknown French Soldiers, buried here.”