runks, fragments of stump a foot or a yard high, here a tree slashed
off short, lifted, and flung a dozen yards, and left head down and
trunk in air; there a row of currant bushes with a yawning shell-crater
in the middle, a ragged remnant of bush at one end and the rest
vanished utterly, leaving only a line of torn stems from an inch to a
foot long to mark their place.

A farm of some size had been at one time a point in the advanced
trenches, and had been converted into a 'keep.' Its late owner would
never have recognised it in its new part. Such walls as were left had
been buttressed out of sight by sandbags; trenches twisted about the
outbuildings, burrowed under and into them, and wriggled out again
through holes in the walls; a market cart, turned upside down, and
earthed over to form a bomb-store, occupied a corner of the farmyard;
cover for snipers' loopholes had been constructed from ploughshares; a
remaining fragment of a grain loft had become an 'observing station';
the farm kitchen a doctor's dressing station; the cow-house a
machine-gun place; the cellar, with the stove transplanted from the
kitchen, a cooking, eating, and sleeping room. All the roofs had been
shelled out of existence. All the walls were notched by shells and
peppered thick with bullet marks. A support trench about shoulder deep
with a low parapet along its front was so damaged by shell fire that
the men for the most part had to move along it bent almost double to
keep out of sight and bullet reach. Every here and there--where a
shell had lobbed fairly in--there was a huge crater, its sides sealing
up the trench with a mass of tumbled earth over which the men scrambled
crouching. Behind the trench a stretch of open field was pitted and
pock-marked with shell-holes of all sizes from the shallow scoop a yard
across to the yawning crater, big and deep enough to bury the whole
field-gun that had made the smaller hole. The field looked exactly
like those pictures one sees in the magazines of a lunar landscape or
the extinct volcanoes of the moon.

The line of men turned at last into a long deep-cut communication
trench leading out into a village. The air in the trench was heavy and
close and stagnant, and the men toiled wearily up it, sweating and
breathing hard. At a branching fork one path was labelled with a
neatly printed board 'To Battn. H.Q. and the Mole Heap,' and the other
path 'To the Duck Pond'--this last, the name of a tren