ntly in
it, for Fritz might lob a bomb over. He was six yards off.

In the forlorn and dying light of that Christmas Day I then noticed a
muffled youngster beside me, who might have been your son, alone,
gripping a rifle with a fixed bayonet, his thoughts Heaven knows where,
a box of bombs ready to hand in the filth; and his charge was to give
first warning of movement in that stillness beyond. As we crawled away,
leaving him there, I turned to look at that boy of yours, and his eyes
met mine....

_December 1916._

XX. The Ruins

For more than two years this town could not have been more remote from
us if it had been in another planet. We were but a few miles from it,
but the hills hid it, and the enemy was between us and the hills. This
town was but a name, a legend.

Now the enemy had left it. When going into it for the first time you
had the feeling that either you or the town was bewitched. Were you
really there? Were time and space abolished? Or perhaps the town itself
was supernatural; it was spectral, projected by unknowable evil. And
for what purpose? Suspicious of its silence, of its solitude, of all
its aspects, you verified its stones by touching them, and looked about
for signs that men had once been there.

Such a town, which has long been in the zone of fire, and is then
uncovered by the foe, gives a wayfarer who early ventures into it the
feeling that this is the day after the Last Day, and that he has been
overlooked. Somehow he did not hear Gabriel's trumpet; everybody else
has gone on. There is not a sound but the subdued crackling of flames
hidden somewhere in the overthrown and abandoned. There is no movement
but where faint smoke is wreathing slowly across the deserted streets.
The unexpected collapse of a wall or cornice is frightful. So is the
silence which follows. A starved kitten, which shapes out of nothing
and is there complete and instantaneous at your feet--ginger stripes,
and a mew which is weak, but a veritable voice of the living--is first
a great surprise, and then a ridiculous comfort. It follows you about.
When you miss it, you go back to look for it--to find the miserable
object racing frantically to meet you. Lonely? The Poles are not more
desolate. There is no place as forlorn as that where man once was
established and busy, where the patient work of his hands is all round,
but where silence has fallen like a secret so dense that you feel that
if it were not also so