to
possess me, never to go, the sense of being in the vicinity of a
tremendous power. A ruined village, or a deserted town actually on the
front does not bring to mind any impression of decay, for the intellect
tends rather to consider t\& means by which the destruction has been
accomplished. One sees villages of the swathes so completely blown to
pieces that they are literally nothing but earthy mounds of rubbish, and
seeing them thus, in a plain still fiercely disputed night and day
between one's own side and the invisible enemy, the mind feels itself in
the presence of force, titanic, secret, and hostile.

Beyond Pont-a-Mousson the road led directly to the trenches of the
Bois-le-Pretre, less than half a mile away. But the disputed trenches
were hidden behind the trees, and I could not see them. Through the
silence of the deserted town sounded the muffled boom of shells and
trench engines bursting in the wood beyond, and every now and then
clouds of gray-black smoke from the explosion would rise above the brown
leaves of the ash trees. The smoke of these explosions rose straight
upwards in a foggy column, such as a locomotive might make if, halted on
its tracks somewhere in the wood, it had put coal on its fires.

With the next day I began my service at the trenches, but the war began
for me that very night.

A room in a bourgeois flat on the third floor of a deserted apartment
house had been assigned me. It was nine o'clock, and I was getting ready
to roll up in my blankets and go to sleep. Beneath the starlit heavens
the street below was black as pitch save when a trench light, floating
serenely down the sky, illuminated with its green-white glow the curving
road and the line of dark, abandoned, half-ruinous villas. There was not
a sound to be heard outside of an occasional rifle shot in the trenches,
sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet balls. I went
round to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen windows to
the lines. A little action, some quarrel of sentries, perhaps, was going
on behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river.
Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad track
running across the un-harvested fields. Gleaming palely through the
French window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed the
deserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished
water-tap above the stone sink. The hard, wooden crash of g