a
score of paces from these forlorn last resting-places apparently so
oddly selected and sadly misplaced; but a second look showed that in
each case the grave was dug where some wall or house afforded cover to
the burying-party from bullets. In the bright sunlight, half-hidden
under or behind heaps of debris, with crosses leaning drunkenly aslant,
these graves looked woefully dreary and depressing. But the files of
men moving round and between them, or stepping carefully over them,
hardly gave them a glance, except where one in passing caught at a
leaning cross and thrust it deeper and straighter into the earth. But
the men's indifference meant no lack of feeling or respect for the
dead. The respect was there, subtle but unmistakable, instanced
slightly by the care every man took not to set foot on a grave, by the
straightening of that cross, by those withered flowers and dirty
wreaths, even as it has been shown scores of times by the men who crawl
at risk of their lives into the open between the forward trenches at
night to bring in their dead for decent burial.

Outside the shattered village stood the remains of a large factory, and
on this the outcoming files of the Regiment converged, and the first
arrivals halted to await the rest. What industry the factory had been
concerned with it was impossible to tell. It was full of machinery,
smashed, bent, twisted, and overturned, all red with rust, mixed up
with and in parts covered by stone and brickwork, beams and iron
girders, the whole sprinkled over with gleaming fragments of
window-glass The outside walls were almost completely knocked flat,
tossed helter-skelter outwards or on top of the machinery. The tall
chimney--another suspected 'observing post' probably--lay in a heap of
broken brickwork with the last yard or two of the base standing up out
of the heap, and even in its remaining stump were other ragged
shell-holes. A couple of huge boilers had been torn off their brick
furnaces by the force of some monster shell and tossed clear yards
away. One was poised across the broken outer wall, with one end in the
road. The thick rounded plates were bent and dented in like a kicked
biscuit-tin, were riddled and pierced through and through as if they
had been paper. The whole factory and its machinery must once have
represented a value of many thousands of francs. Now it was worth just
the value of its site--less the cost of clearing it of debris--and the