d serenely. There was a sense of life, motion and
exhilaration abroad, but only for the first half hour of our journey.
Then momentarily a depression grew up about us. Fields and trees were
becoming dead, as if a swarm of locusts had eaten their way across
them. Greenness was vanishing. Houses were becoming untenanted; there
were holes in the walls of many of them, through which one gained
glimpses of the sky. Here, by the road-side, we passed a cluster of
insignificant graves. Then, almost without warning, the barbed-wire
entanglements commenced, and the miles and miles of abandoned
trenches. This, not a year ago from the day on which I write, was the
Hun's country. Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line, he
retreated from it. Our offensives on the Somme had converted his Front
into a dangerous salient.

We are slowing down; the road is getting water-logged and full of
holes. The skull of a dead town grows up on the horizon. Even at this
distance the light behind empty windows glares malevolently like the
nothingness in vacant sockets. A horror is over everything. The horror
is not so much due to the destruction as to the total absence of any
signs of life. One man creeping through the landscape would make it
seem more kindly. I have been in desolated towns often, but there were
always the faces of our cheery Tommies to smile out from cellars and
gaps in the walls. From here life is banished utterly. The battle-line
has retired eastward; one can hear the faint rumble of the guns at
times. No civilian has come to re-inhabit this unhallowed spot.

We enter what were once its streets. They are nothing now but craters
with boards across them. On either side the trees lie flat along the
ground, sawn through within a foot of the roots. What landmarks remain
are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling
roofs. The entire place must have been given over to explosion and
incendiarism before the Huns departed. One stands in awe of such
completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by
the term "frightfulness." As far as eye can reach there is nothing to
be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered
with a green slime where water has accumulated. This is not the
unavoidable ruin of shell-fire. No battle was fought here. The
demolition was the wanton spite of an enemy who, because he could not
hold the place, was determined to leave nothing serviceable beh