ug shell-slits,
and through gaps in the tangled, rusted barbed wire; at one spot we
passed eighteen American dead, laid out in two neat rows, ready for
removal to the cemetery that the U.S. Army had established in the
neighbourhood; we went within twenty yards of a disabled tank that a
land mine had rendered _hors de combat_; we came across another tank
lumbered half-way across a road. "Tanks always seem to take it into
their heads to collapse on a main road and interrupt traffic," muttered
the colonel sardonically.

There were twelve hundred yards of a straight sunken road for us to
ride through before we reached Bony. That road was a veritable gallery
of German dead. They lay in twos and threes, in queer horrible
postures, along its whole unkempt length, some of them with blackened
decomposed faces and hands, most of them newly killed, for this was a
road that connected the outer defences of the Hindenburg Line with the
network of wire and trenches that formed the Hindenburg Line itself.
"Best sight I've seen since the war," said Wilde with satisfaction. And
if the colonel and myself made no remark we showed no disagreement.
Pity for dead Boche finds no place in the average decent-minded man's
composition. Half a dozen of our armoured cars, wheels off,
half-burned, or their steering apparatus smashed, lay on the entrenched
and wired outskirts of Bony, part of the Hindenburg Line proper. In the
village itself we found Red Cross cars filling up with wounded; Boche
prisoners were being used as stretcher-bearers; groups of waiting
infantry stood in the main street; runners flitted to and fro.

"We'll leave our horses here," said the colonel; and the grooms guided
them to the shelter of a high solid wall. The colonel, Wilde, and I
ascended the main street, making eastward. A couple of 5.9's dropped
close to the northern edge of the village as we came out of it. We met
a party of prisoners headed by two officers--one short, fat, nervous,
dark, bespectacled; the other bearded, lanky, nonchalant, and of good
carriage. He carried a gold-nobbed Malacca cane. Neither officer looked
at us as we passed. The tall one reminded me of an officer among the
first party of Boche prisoners I saw in France in August 1916. His
arrogant, disdainful air had roused in me a gust of anger that made me
glad I was in the war.

We went through a garden transformed into a dust-bin, and dipped down a
hummocky slope that rose again to a chalky ridg