rt, where he adorned it with a painted window of St. George
and the Dragon.

Along the Arras-Bethune road are various cemeteries where the men of
the different battalions are buried. The greatest care was taken in
collecting the dead and making their last resting place as neat and
comely as possible. A plank road was constructed to connect the
Bethune-Arras road with the Lens-Arras road further forward. It lay in
a straight line over the broken ground cut up by trenches and huge
craters, and brought one to the headquarters of the siege battery in
which my son was a gunner. On all sides stretched the plain which our
men had won. Far off, on clear days, one could see in the distance the
little hamlets behind the German lines.

We had taken the Ridge, but there were villages in the plain which
were not yet in our hands. I heard there was to be an attack one (p. 177)
morning early. So the night before, I left my dugout at one a.m.
It was a strange, weird walk along the plank road and then down the
railway track to Farbus wood. The barrage was to open at four-thirty,
and at four-ten a.m. I walked into the dugout where the Headquarters
of the 3rd Artillery Brigade were. We waited till four twenty-five,
and then I went up to see the barrage. Before us lay the plain, and
all round us on the hillside, except in the space before us, were
trees of Farbus Wood. At four-thirty the barrage opened, and we had a
fine view of the line of bursting shells along the enemy's front. For
a time our fire was very intense, and when it eased off I started down
the hill to the town of Willerval, where in a dugout I found the
officers of one of our battalions regaling themselves with the bottles
of wine and mineral water which the Germans had left behind them in
their well-stocked cellars. Willerval was badly smashed, but enough
was left to show what a charming place it must have been in the days
before the war. In the shell-ploughed gardens, spring flowers were
putting up inquiring faces, and asking for the smiles and admiration
of the flower-lovers who would tread those broken paths no more. I sat
in a quiet place by a ruined brick wall and tried to disentangle the
curious sensations which passed through the mind, as I felt the breeze
lightly fanning my face, smelt the scent of flowers, heard the
skylarks singing, saw the broken houses and conservatories, and
listened to the shells which every now and then fell on the road to
the east of the