In those days we had not yet
taken Neuve Chapelle, and Richebourg l'Avoue, which was in front of our
lines, was considered "unhealthy." Richebourg St. Vaast, on the other
hand, was well behind our lines and was considered by our billeting
officers quite a good residential neighbourhood.

We had left G.H.Q., and after a journey of two hours or so passed
through Laventie, which had been rather badly mauled by shell-fire, and
began to thread our way through the skein of roads and by-roads that
enmeshes the two Richebourgs. The natural features of the country were
inscrutable, and landmarks there were none. The countryside grew
absolutely deserted and the solitary farms were roofless and untenanted.
Eventually we found our road blocked by a barricade of fallen masonry in
front of a village which was as inhospitable as the Cities of the Plain.

A vast silence brooded over the landscape, broken now and again by a
noise like the crackling of thorns under a pot. As we took cover behind
a wall of ruined houses we heard a sinister hiss, but whence it came or
what invisible trajectory it traced through the leaden skies overhead
neither of us could tell. Silence again fell like a mist upon the land;
not a bird sang, not a twig moved. The winter sun was sinking in the
west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky--the one touch of
colour in the sombre greyness. The land was flat as the palm of one's
hand, its monotony relieved only by lines of pollarded willows on which
some sappers had strung a field telephone. Raindrops hung on the copper
wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was
scooped and moulded by the rain into little saucer-like depressions as
if by a potter's thumb. Behind us lay the reserve trenches, their clay
walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed
wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown. The
village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man's Land
between the enemy's lines and our own, and the sodden fields were not
more desolate.

A tornado of artillery fire had swept over it, and of the houses nothing
was left but indecencies, shattered walls and naked rafters, beneath
which were choked heaps of household furniture, broken beds, battered
lamps, and a wicker-chair overturned as in a drunken brawl. What had
once been the street was now a quarry of broken bricks, with here and
there vast circular craters as though a gig