upper
storey had been blown off by shell fire and lay in the garden behind
the house, a jumble of brickwork, window-frames, tiles, beams, beds and
bedroom furniture, linen, and clothes.

These houses were inexpressibly sad and forlorn-looking, with all their
privacy and inner homeliness naked and exposed to the passer-by and the
staring sunlight. Some were no more than heaps of brick and stone and
mortar; but these gave not nearly such a sense of desolation and
desertion as those less damaged, as one, for instance, with its front
blown completely out, so that one could look into all its rooms, upper
and lower and the stairs between, exactly as one looks into those
dolls' houses where the front is hinged to swing open.

The village had been on the edge of the fighting zone for months, had
been casually shelled each day in normal times, bombarded furiously
during every attack or counter-attack. The church, with its spire or
tower, had probably been suspected as an artillery observing station by
the Germans, and so had drawn a full share of the fire. All that was
left of the church itself was one corner of shell-holed walls, and a
few roof-beams torn and splintered and stripped of cover. The tower
was a broken, jagged, stump--an empty shell, with one side blown almost
completely out; the others, or what remained of them, cracked and
tottering. The churchyard was a wild chaos of tumbled masonry, broken
slates, uprooted and overturned tombstones, jumbled wooden crosses,
crucifixes, black wooden cases with fronts of splintered glass, torn
wreaths, and crosses of imitation flowers. Amongst the graves yawned
huge shell craters; tossed hither and thither amongst the graves and
broken monuments and bricks and rubbish were bones and fragments of
coffins.

But all the graves were not in the churchyard. The whole village was
dotted from end to end with them, some alone in secluded corners,
others in rows in the backyards and vegetable gardens. Most of them
were marked with crosses, each made of two pieces of packing-case or
biscuit-box, with a number, rank, name, and regiment printed in
indelible pencil. On some of the graves were bead-work flowers, on
others a jam-pot or crock holding a handful of withered sun-dried
flower-stalks. Nearly all were huddled in close to house or garden
walls, one even in the narrow passage between two houses. There were,
in many cases, other and less ugly open spaces and gardens offering