tance down the slope is a brand
new cemetery, with new metal wreaths and even a few flowers; it is
a disciplined array of uniform wooden crosses, each with its list of
soldiers' names. Unless I am wholly mistaken in France no Germans will
ever get a chance for ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as
they have done its predecessor.

We walked over the mud heaps and litter that had once been houses
towards the centre of Dompierre village, and tried to picture to
ourselves what the place had been. Many things are recognisable in
Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for instance,
there are quire large triangular pieces of the church wall upstanding
at Dompierre. And a mile away perhaps down the hill on the road towards
Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery are very distinct. A sugar
refinery is an affair of big iron receptacles and great flues and pipes
and so forth, and iron does not go down under gun fire as stone or brick
does. The whole fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell
holes, that raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general
shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at the
bottom of the sea.

There wasn't a dog left of the former life of Dompierre. There was not
even much war traffic that morning on the worn and muddy road. The guns
muttered some miles away to the west, and a lark sang. But a little way
farther on up the road was an intermediate dressing station, rigged up
with wood and tarpaulins, and orderlies were packing two wounded men
into an ambulance. The men on the stretchers were grey faced, as though
they had been trodden on by some gigantic dirty boot.

As we came back towards where our car waited by the cemetery I heard
the jingle of a horseman coming across the space behind us. I turned and
beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always to be happening in
this incredible war. This man was, I suppose, a native officer of some
cavalry force from French north Africa. He was a handsome dark brown
Arab, wearing a long yellow-white robe and a tall cap about which ran
a band of sheepskin. He was riding one of those little fine lean horses
with long tails that I think are Barbary horses, his archaic saddle rose
fore and aft of him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather boots
were stuck into great silver stirrups. He might have ridden straight
out of the Arabian nights. He passed thoughtfully, picking his way
delicately among