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This was sumptuous and yet dirty, hung with rare velvet curtains splashed with wine-stains, and panelled with costly woods which were pocked with pistol-marks. On the table was a great chart of the Caribbean Sea, and beside it, with compasses in his hand, sat a clean-shaven, pale-faced man with a fur cap and a claret-coloured coat of damask.
She did not interrupt Candeille's long and voluble explanation: vaguely she wondered what it was all about, and even now when the Frenchwoman paused, Marguerite said nothing, but watched her quietly as she took a folded paper from the capacious pocked of her cloak and then held it out with a look of timidity towards Lady Blakeney. "My maid need not come with me," said Desiree Candeille humbly.
The walls of the white church were splashed with blood, pocked with bullets. Dead men lay at the door; within were those of the wounded who could get there. But the shells came too, the shells pierced the roof and entered. War came in, ebon, blood-stained, and grinning. The Prince of Peace was crowded out. The artillery was deafening.
There was a big black man lying where he had fallen, his huge chest pocked with bullet-marks, every wound rosetted with its circle of flies. The Arab was stretched out within a few yards of him, with two hands clasped over the dreadful thing which had been his head. Across him was lying Anerley's fowling-piece, one barrel discharged, the other at half cock.
Drew wet his handkerchief, or the sad gray rag which served that purpose, and carefully washed out Shawnee's nostrils, rubbing the horse gently down the nose and around his pricked ears. Croxton spat and a splotch of brown tobacco juice pocked the roadside gravel. "Now ain't you cheerful!" he observed. "No, I've no hole in my middle, or my top, or my bottom and I don't want none, neither.
The little stubby trees that stand here and there, like bushes with a wooden leg to them, were drizzled with a mess of wet, and hung their points with dropping. Wherever the butt-end of a hedgerow came up from the hollow ground, like the withers of a horse, holes of splash were pocked and pimpled in the yellow sand of coneys, or under the dwarf tree's ovens.
At my left slept my friend, the painter; on my right, a great devil of a trumpeter, with face pocked like a sewing thimble and yellow as a glass of bile. He combined two professions, that of cobbler by day and a procurer of girls by night.
From Gommecourt to the Somme was an area of concentrated destruction. The wilderness swelled outwards, becoming twelve miles wide at parts. Tens of thousands of shells had pocked the dirty soil, scores of mine explosions had cratered it. Only the pen of a Zola could describe adequately the zone's intense desolation, as seen from the air.
The craters lie in a blown and dug up wilderness of heaps of reddish earth, pocked with shell-holes, and tumbled with wire. The enemy lines are much broken and ruined, their parapets thrown down, the mouths of their dugouts blown in, and their pride abased. The Fricourt position was one of the boasts of the enemy on this front.
I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously on the sloping withers of razorbacked mountains towns that were old when the Saviour was born; or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all pocked and pecked with age, looping their arches across the land for miles on miles; or the fields, scored and scarified by three thousand years of unremitting, relentless, everlasting agriculture; or the wide-horned Italian cattle that browsed in those fields; or yet the woman who darted to the door of every signal-house we passed and came to attention, with a long cudgel held flat against her shoulder like a sentry's musket.
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