iron.

I saw the ruins of the Chateau de Henencourt two years after my first
visit there. The enemy's line had come closer to it and it was a target
for their guns. Our guns--heavy and light--were firing from the back
yard and neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Shells had already
broken the roofs and turrets of the chateau and torn away great chunks
of wall. A colonel of artillery had his headquarters in the petit salon.
His hand trembled as he greeted me.

"I'm not fond of this place," he said. "The whole damn thing will come
down on my head at any time. I think I shall take to the cellars."

We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the way down to the
vault. A shell came over the chateau and burst in the outhouses.

"They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago," said the colonel. "Made a
mess of some heavy gunners."

There was a sense of imminent death about us, but it was not so sinister
a place as farther on, where a brother of mine sat in a hole directing
his battery... The Countess of Henencourt had gone. She went away with
her dairymaids, driving her cattle down the roads.

XII

One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British
soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took
over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the village of
Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of the salient it
seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance not found in other
places. Strange as it seemed, the village garrisoned by our men was in
advance of our trench lines, with nothing dividing them from the enemy
but a little undergrowth--and the queerest part of it all was the sense
of safety, the ridiculously false security with which one could wander
about the village and up the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that
one's movements were being watched by German eyes and that the whole
place could be blown off the face of the earth... but for the convenient
fact that the Germans, who were living in the village of Curlu, beyond
the footpath, were under our own observation and at the mercy of our own
guns.

That sounded like a fairy-tale to men who, in other places, could not go
over the parapet of the first-line trenches, or even put their heads up
for a single second, without risking instant death.

I stood on a hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men. A
battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some dist