teaching they took to their
nauseating trade. It's all in the Old Book--how shall they learn,
unless they be taught? Had they had the teaching--well, listen to the
story of this very superior young "gentleman," one time deputy chief
stomach bender of Mogg's Mammoth Millinery Emporium--terms. Strictly
Cash. What the sub deputy chief waistcoat creaser will say if he reads
these words I shudder to think. You see, the very superior young
"gentleman" was _so_ genteel.

A hot morning sun shone down on the outskirts of the town. Nothing
moved, nothing stirred; utter silence brooded over the houses that once
had been buzzing with people--the people of Arras. Now their only
occupants were rats. The little gardens at the back were dank with
unchecked weeds, save where a great conical hole showed the clean brown
earth. And at the bottom of each of these holes lay a pool of foetid
green water. The walls were crumbling, decay was rampant, the place
breathed corruption. Occasionally the silence would be broken by a
crash, and a little heap of brick rubble would subside into the road,
raising a cloud of thick choking dust. Occasionally there would be
another sound, like the drone of a great beetle, followed by a dull
echoing roar and a bigger cloud of dust. Occasionally would come the
ping-phut of a stray bullet; but of human life there was no sign.

Not, that is to say, to the casual observer; but to the man who looked
out of the aeroplane circling above much was visible which you or I
would not see. To him there came the vision of an occasional move
behind some mouldering wall: sometimes an upturned face, sometimes the
glint of steel. In one garden by a broken cucumber frame a man was
polishing his bayonet, and the flash from it caught the observer's eye.
Just opposite--thirty yards away--two or three men were sitting round a
fire from which the smoke curled slowly up. And the bayonet cleaner
was clothed in khaki, while the cookers had on a dirty field grey;
between them lay No Man's Land. But to the casual observer--silence:
silence and death and the dreadful stink of corruption. Many others
had cleaned bayonets and cooked stews under these same conditions, and
many in the doing thereof had gone suddenly, and without warning, into
the great Silence. For it was a sniper's paradise, as the
victims--could they have spoken--would have testified. As it was they
lay there lightly buried, and the same fool men made