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Updated: May 18, 2025
I shall always remember Contay Woods, the huts with their floors of hard mud reinforced by harder tree-stumps, and the slimy path down to parade when we left. On November 19 we reached Albert, whose familiar church needs no description. What struck me principally on arrival was the battered sordidness of the place and the filthy state of the roads, on which the mud was well up to the ankles.
In front with a gentle inclination rises a grassy slope broken by occasional tree-stumps. A line of fire upon the summit marks the position of the Rebel infantry, and nearer and on the top of a lower eminence to the right stand their horse. Up to this time no Guardsman has struck a blow, but blue coats and bay horses lie thick along the bloody lane. Their time has come.
He was whistling to himself, "Come, Lasses and Lads." Silver had terrible hard work getting up the knoll. What with the steepness of the incline, the thick tree-stumps, and the soft sand, he and his crutch were as helpless as a ship in stays. But he stuck to it like a man, in silence, and at last arrived before the captain, whom he saluted in the handsomest style.
He will come to it through marshes and through swamps, crossing a deserted backwater, finding firm land beyond, then coming to further shallow patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps stand, and beyond which again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds leave undetermined, for one hundred yards after another, the limits of the vast stream.
From the darkness behind them a German flare soared up and burst, throwing up bushes and shattered buildings, sandbag parapets, broken tree-stumps, sticks and stones in luminous-edged silhouette. A machine-gun burst into a stutter of fire, the reports sounding faint at first and louder and louder as the muzzle swept round in its arc.
He illustrated his meaning by showing me how the head had been washed from its place, and swept between a couple of tree-stumps, where it had remained covered with mud and rubbish, till it had caught his eye, such a trophy being too valuable to lie there in neglect.
I, too, was at the wedding; they had music there, sang, ate, and drank; there was meat, there were cheesecakes, and baskets full of everything, and buckets full of strong waters. To-day I went, yesterday I came; I found an egg among the tree-stumps; I knocked it against somebody's head, and gave him a bald place, and he's got it still.
All night long he has lain curled up in the roundest of round balls hard by the camp; there, in the lea of tree-stumps or snow-drift, he has dreamt the dreams of peace and comfort. If the night has been one of storm, the fast-falling flakes have added to his sense of warmth by covering him completely beneath them.
In that strange, ghostly light, which gave a certain cloak of mystery even to such common objects as tree-stumps and boulders of rock, Finn saw two unfamiliar figures emerge from the scrub below the spur next that of Warrigal's den, and begin slowly to climb toward Mount Desolation itself.
All the country settlements are built pretty much upon the same plan: each has its Campo Santo with white walls and high grey gate, through which the coffin is escorted by Gaucho-like riders, who dismount to enter. Doramas proved to be a fine monte, with tree-stumps, especially chestnuts, somewhat surprising in a region of ferns and furze.
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