ch, being a
reminder of the winter and the wet. The officer leading the party
turned into the trench for 'The Mole Heap,' walked up it, and emerged
into the sunlight of the grass-grown village street, skirted a house,
crossed the street by a trench, and passed through a hole chipped out
of the brick wall into a house, the men tramping at his heels. The
whole village was seamed with a maze of trenches, but these were only
for use when the shelling had been particularly heavy. At other times
people moved about the place by paths sufficiently well protected by
houses and walls against the rifle bullets that had practically never
ceased to smack into the village for many months past. These paths
wandered behind buildings, across gardens, into and out of houses
either by doors or by holes in the wall, over or round piles of rubble
or tumbled brick-work, burrowed at times below ground-level on patches
exposed to fire, ran frequently through a dozen cottages on end,
passage having been effected simply by hacking holes through the
connecting brick walls, in one place dived underground down some short
stairs and took its way through several cellars by the same simple
method of walking through the walls from one cellar to another. The
houses were littered with empty and rusty tins, torn and dirty
clothing, ash-choked stoves, trampled straw, and broken furniture. The
back-yards and gardens were piled with heaps of bricks and tiles,
biscuit and jam tins; broken fences and rotted rags were overrun with a
rank growth of grass and weeds and flowers, pitted with shell-holes and
strewn with graves.

The whole village was wrecked from end to end, was no more than a
charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one
building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles
clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked and
bulged and broken.

In the houses they passed through the men could still find sufficient
traces of the former occupants to indicate their class and station.
One might have been a labourer's cottage, with a rough deal table, a
red-rusted stove-fireplace, an oleograph in flaming crude colours of
the 'Virgin and Child' hanging on the plaster wall, the fragments of a
rough cradle overturned in a corner, a few coarse china crocks and
ornaments and figures chipped and broken and scattered about the
mantel, and the bare board floor. Another house had plainly been a
home