eep, deep blue. To north, to east, to
south, yellow-green flashes of guns stabbed the darkness, and the
redder glare of bursting shells came ever and anon. Across an open
heath, along a road pitted with shell-holes to the skeleton of a
shell-smashed town like some ghostly sentinel to the gates of war.
Here the sweet smell of a September evening was every now and then
rendered hideous by pungent odors through the dead town, where the
smell of gas still clung to houses and issued up from cellars. Now
trenches lay along the road, and the golden harvest moon turned to
silver and flooded the scene, casting long, strange shadows on the
ground. A deepening roar, followed by the whizzing scream of shells as
hidden batteries poured death into the German lines. A whistle, a
roar, a thud, a sudden check, and on as a couple of shells spattered
the road ahead. "Halt, off-load the limbers"--on to a crater where our
guides awaited us. Here the chalk molds and craters of the shattered
German lines along which we walked looked like miniature snow-clad
mountains in the moonlight. Destruction everywhere, but a destruction
that was grand while it was dreadful. And so to dug-outs, and the
night-time "hate" and gas--a doze, and the wonderful dawn of a perfect
daybreak. Exploration of trenches, broken by pauses to look at aerial
combats far up in the blue, where planes looked like bits of silver
dust whirled about by the breeze. Interest covered and crushed every
other emotion, and though many of the things that lie about seem
loathsome in cold-blooded language, I found nothing of loathing there.
Now a human skull with matted ginger hair, but with the top bashed in,
now a hand or arm sticking up from some badly-buried body or
shell-smashed grave, and everywhere the appalling waste of war--spades,
shovels, German clothes, armor, ammunition scattered in a chaos beyond
words.

Crash! bang! boom! and like rabbits to earth once more; we have been
spotted, and whiz-bangs fall--a dozen wasted German shells.

Packed like sardines we lie and try to snatch some moments' sleep.
With revolvers by our sides, and respirators on our chests, we live in
the perpetual night of underground, coming to the surface to work or
see a little of God's sunshine or explore, as shells permit and the
spirit moves us. Time as a measure has ceased to be and our watches
serve just as checks on our movements. I love life, and oh, how I hate
it too!

G. B. MAN