ing-houses. Some of
them were a tangle of rafters mixed up with heaps of brick and
miscellaneous rubbish--stoves, pots and pans, chair-legs, pictures,
bedding, boxes, and all kinds of household articles. Others had been
dispersed around. Others seemed to have been tipped up bodily, so that
all their contents had been spilt into the street, and then to have been
dropped back again with such an impact that they had collapsed on their
own foundations. The sweet, sickly smell of bodies that had not been
decaying long, and the rank, pungent smell of those that were
approaching total dissolution emanated from under heaps of wreckage and
from hidden cellars.

The devastation increased with every mile and the shell-holes came
closer and closer together. Dead horses, shattered guns, wagons, and
limbers lay overturned in the ditches. At one spot on the roadside the
legs and buttocks of a man, all brown and shrivelled, slanted upwards
from a deep, wide rut, many heavy wheels having passed across the small
of his back.

Gradually houses, trees and bushes disappeared entirely. We reached the
site of a village that before the war had sheltered several thousands of
people. Nothing remained except small bits of brick mingling with the
bare soil, piled up and scooped and churned and tossed by shell-fire.

Here, too, there were many dead. A little way off the road lay an
Englishman who could not have fallen more than a few days before. His
hands were clenched, his mouth wide open, his eyes fixed and staring.
Near him was a tall German. He lay at full length with arms outstretched
and legs crossed. His left hand, immersed in a pool, was white and
puffy. His right hand was half closed and only slightly wrinkled. His
side had been ripped open and fragments of entrail projected from the
rent. The water beneath and around him was stained with blood. His
pockets were turned inside out and papers and postcards lay scattered
around in the usual manner. His cloak had been thrown across his face.

Other bodies had lain unburied for several months; others for several
years, and of these only the mud-stained bones were left.

We reached the highest point in the series of so-called ridges. The
desolate country spread out before us--miles and miles of low
undulations ploughed by shell-fire and bared of everything except an
occasional concrete shelter or the splintered stump of a dead tree.

We marched in silence through this dismal land of ruin