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Updated: June 17, 2025
They will cross trenches, no matter how wide, crawl in and out shell-holes, and through barbed wire, push down trees and...." I turned to the General. "I certainly suggest, sir, that should go to hospital; the war is getting on his nerves. He will tell me next that they can fly as well." The General laughed. But quite seriously he told me it was all true.
"You will see that none others are shown into this compartment," said Captain Ribaut to the guard in French. The door was closed. "After we leave the station there will be something to see," explained their guide. "Yet France is not very attractive in such weather. Up at the front, though, there is nothing at all of France left. There is nothing but bare ground, full of shell-holes.
During the time we were in, it rained continuously and at no time was a star visible. The positions where they were stationed were exactly like the rest of the surrounding country merely enlarged shell-holes with, perhaps, a fragment of a sand-bag parapet. No lights could be shown, they did not even dare use "Very lights," as our "star-lights" are known.
And under the shattered walls, among fallen buttresses and blackened stumps of oaks, are the graves of Léomont's heroes; graves everywhere, over the hillside; graves in the open; graves in sheltered corners where wild flowers have begun to grow; their tricolour cockades and wooden crosses mirrored in the blue of water-filled shell-holes; graves in the historic cellars, covered with a pall of darkness; graves along the slope of the hill, where old trenches have left ruts in the rank grass.
Opposite the mound, perhaps a hundred yards up the hill, is another, much bigger, irregular mound, of chalk that has become dirty, with some relics of battered black wire at its base. The space between the two mounds is now green with grass, though pitted with shell-holes, and marked in many places with the crosses of graves.
I noticed by fresh shell-holes that Bosche had a rather bad habit of annoying the place with his pip-squeaks, but generally they only resulted in scoring a Blighty for more or one of the occupants and, for others, they were a source of amusement in the shape of gambling on the spot the next one would fall.
Three or four Germans suddenly get up from some hole in No Man's Land, and bolt for their trench like rabbits. Within forty yards of the German parapet the leading men in our line find themselves alone. The line has dwindled to a few scanty groups. These are dropping suddenly their comrades cannot say whether they are taking cover in shell-holes, or whether they have been hit.
We were dropping into a slight valley. The shell-holes were less few, but bodies lay all over the ground, and a terrible groaning arose from all sides. At one time we seemed to be advancing in little groups. I was at the head of one for a moment or two, only to realise shortly afterwards that I was alone. I came up to the German wire.
The atmosphere was fresh and redolent of clean earth; odd shell-holes you came across were, miracle of miracles, grass-grown a sight for eyes tired with the drab stinking desolation of Flanders. A more than spring warmth quickened growing things.
I got a lift in another lorry along a road crumbling under the unusual amount of traffic that weighed upon it. Our advance had been so swift that the war scars on the countryside had not entirely blighted its normal characteristics. Here were shell-holes, but no long succession of abandoned gun-positions, few horse-tracks, fewer trenches, and no barbed wire.
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