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Updated: June 17, 2025
We proceeded as fast as the innumerable shell-holes and old barbed wire would allow, and made straight for the ruins of , then crossing the road we followed the communication trenches along the top. It was still pitch dark. I looked at my watch. It was 4.30. The trenches were full of life. Men were pouring in to take up their positions.
The light-railway engine pulled the trucks slowly along by winding circuitous routes. It was a warm, sunny evening. Everything was green and peaceful. The farms and cottages bore no signs of war. But soon we saw a number of shell-holes grouped round cross-roads, and gradually, as we proceeded, the fields came to be pitted more and more thickly. We skirted a large village. It was deserted.
Forward again of B.H.Q. the country was perhaps not so badly smashed, except in the spots most exposed to shell fire. But the shell-holes were often full of German dead I counted nearly 100 within a quarter of a mile of Dan Cottages. And on the forward wooden tracks used by our transport, the ground reeked like a slaughter-house. Fragments of everything just swept off the tracks.
The houses were littered with empty and rusty tins, torn and dirty clothing, ash-choked stoves, trampled straw, and broken furniture. The back-yards and gardens were piled with heaps of bricks and tiles, biscuit and jam tins; broken fences and rotted rags were overrun with a rank growth of grass and weeds and flowers, pitted with shell-holes and strewn with graves.
Jimmie's blood was stirred; he had an impulse to answer the call, to rush to the rescue of those desperate men, crouching in shell-holes and fighting day and night for a week without rest. If only Jimmie could have gone right to them! If only it had not been necessary for him to go to a training-camp and submit himself to a military martinet!
Next morning the enemy aeroplane appeared again at its appointed hour and sailed overhead, leaving behind it a long wake of smoke-puffs; and at the same hour in the afternoon as the previous shelling the German gun opened fire, dropping its first shell neatly fifty yards further from the shell-holes of the day before.
Parts of the area were simply connected shell-holes, outposts, the occupants of which might for hours at a stretch be completely isolated from the remainder of their battalion, and, receiving no visit from anyone, have not the merest inkling of what was going on outside of what lies before their own limited vision.
An officer, who was in the trenches south-west of the Butte and saw the Northumberlands go forward, told me that he had never seen such a strange sight. The men staggered forward a few yards, tumbled into shell-holes or stopped to pull out less fortunate comrades, forward a few more yards, and the same again and again.
The surprising thing was how few casualties there were among the crews of the tanks, who went out prepared to die and found themselves safe in their armored shells after the day's fight was over, whether their ships had gone across a line of German trenches, developed engine trouble, or temporarily foundered in shell-holes.
One devastated area was exactly like another a heap of rubble, a morass of shell-holes, and a tangle of wire. The amount of human labor which would be required to restore such a countryside seemed incalculable; and to the returned traveler any number of milliards of dollars was inadequate to express in matter the destruction thus impressed upon his spirit.
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