through the ceiling when they found what had happened. The French
soldiers prodded the ceiling with their bayonets, and all the plaster
broke, falling on them. A German, fat and heavy, fell half-way through
the rafters, and a bayonet was poked into him as he stuck there. The
whole ceiling gave way, and the Germans upstairs came downstairs, in a
heap. They fought like wolves--wild beasts--with fear and rage. French
and Germans clawed at one another's throats, grabbed hold of noses,
rolled over each other. The French sergeant told me he had his teeth
into a German's neck. The man was all over him, pinning his arms, trying
to choke him. It was the French lieutenant who did most damage. He fired
his last shot and smashed a German's face with his empty revolver. Then
he caught hold of the marble Venus by the legs and swung it above his
head, in the old Berserker style, and laid out Germans like ninepins...
The fellows in the basement surrendered."

VI

The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin,
and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or the
marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon piles
of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner officer took
us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had their battery
nearby. We stumbled over broken walls and pushed through undergrowth
to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and wire frames
with immortelles remained as relics of that garden where the people of
Vermelles had laid their dead to rest. New dead had followed old dead.
I stumbled over something soft, like a ball of clay, and saw that it was
the head of a faceless man, in a battered kepi. From a ditch close by
came a sickly stench of half-buried flesh.

"The whole place is a pest-house," said the gunner.

Another voice spoke from some hiding-place.

"Salvo!"

The earth shook and there was a flash of red flame, and a shock of noise
which hurt one's ear-drums.

"That's my battery," said the gunner officer. "It's the very devil when
one doesn't expect it."

I was introduced to the gentleman who had said "Salvo!" He was the
gunner-major, and a charming fellow, recently from civil life. All the
battery was made up of New Army men learning their job, and learning it
very well, I should say. There was no arrogance about them.

"It's sporting of you to come along to a spot like this," said one of
them. "I wou