e scenes of war. From the ridge of the hill, downwards
towards an illimitable plain, the road takes its way through a
ghost-world of ruined homes where dark and ragged masses of broken
roof and wall stand out in blurred outlines against indistinct and
formless backgrounds.

A gun is belching forth murder and sudden death from an (p. 304)
emplacement on the right; in a spinney on the left a battery is noisy
and the flashes from there light up the cluster of trees that stand
huddled together as if for warmth. Vehicles of war lumber along the
road, field-kitchens, gun-limbers, water-carts, motor-ambulances, and
Red Cross waggons. Men march towards us, men in brown, bearing rifles
and swords, and pass us in the night. A shell bursts near, and there
is a sound as of a handful of peas being violently flung to the
ground.

For the night we stop in a village where the branches of the trees are
shrapnelled clean of their leaves, and where all the rafters of the
houses are bared of their covering of red tiles. A wind may rise when
you're dropping off to sleep on the stone flags of a cellar, and then
you can hear the door of the house and of nearly every house in the
place creaking on its hinges. The breeze catches the telephone wires
which run from the artillery at rear to their observation stations,
and the wires sing like light shells travelling through space.

At dawn you waken to the sound of anti-aircraft guns firing at
aeroplanes which they never bring down. The bullets, falling back from
exploding shells, swish to the earth with a sound like burning (p. 305)
magnesium wires and split a tile if any is left, or crack a skull, if
any is in the way, with the neatest dispatch. It is wise to remain in
shelter until the row is over.

Outside, the birds are merry on the roofs; you can hear them sing
defiantly at the lone cat that watches them from the grassy spot which
was once a street. Spiders' webs hang over the doorways, many flies
have come to an untimely end in the glistening snares, poor little
black, helpless things. Here and there lies a broken crucifix and a
torn picture of the Holy Family, the shrines that once stood at the
street corners are shapeless heaps of dust and weeds and the village
church is in ruins.

No man is allowed to walk in the open by day; a German observation
balloon, a big banana of a thing, with ends pointing downwards stands
high over the earth ten kilometres away and sees all