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We thought of the shell-scarred country, with its piles of smouldering ashes, its pallid women with their haunted faces, the deathlike silence of the ruined streets. We thought of these things, but we didn't tell him of them. We told him the war was going on in great shape: the Allies were advancing all along the line, and were going to be in Berlin by Christmas.
The roads which had been remade by the British over the shell-scarred and honeycombed surface of the land; the aerodromes; the training-camps; the tanks; the wonderful new railways for troops and ammunition: the bands of German prisoners docilely at work.
"It has been taken and retaken by Germans and French and English, mon pauvre ami, until there is no farm left. You ought to understand that." It was a thing that Doggie most perfectly understood: a patch of hideous wilderness, of poisoned, shell-scarred, ditch-defiled, barren, loathsome earth. And her other relations?
Limbers and lorries had done their work, and the only objects which filled the shell-scarred streets were slow-moving ambulances, little blood-stained groups of "walking wounded," and the troops of a new division moving up into the line.
I have an uncomfortable suspicion, too, that William has given the other waiters his version of the affair, but I feel safe so long as it does not reach the committee. We were walking up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées with Dr. V , trying to read the story of the siege of Paris in the shell-scarred walls and the sidewalks plowed up by grape-shot. You see those four closed windows above the balcony?
We dipped into a slippery shell-scarred track that wound through a hummocky copse, swung southwards along a sunken road, and then made due east again, drawing nearer a dense forest of stubby firs that stretched far as eye could see. This was the wood into which our infantry had pushed fighting patrols on Sept. 1.
In this we were lucky under the conditions. The luck could scarcely have held had the job lasted much longer than a quarter of an hour which is a consoling thought when one is safe back and writing to a dear friend in England, not? Northward, along the left-hand side of the road, was my first subject; and a damned unpleasant subject it was a dirty-soiled, shell-scarred wilderness.
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