one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the guns. The wide
fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of new-turned earth,
made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in length and in
breadth.

I point out to Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to
have been traversed by a giant plow. But he is absorbed to his very
vitals in the metamorphosis of the country's face.

He indicates a space in the plain with his finger, and with a stupefied
air, as though he came out of a dream--"The Red Tavern!" It is a flat
field, carpeted with broken bricks.

And what is that, there? A milestone? No, it is not a milestone. It is
a head, a black head, tanned and polished. The mouth is all askew, and
you can see something of the mustache bristling on each side--the great
head of a carbonized cat. The corpse--it is German--is underneath,
buried upright.

"And that?" It is a ghastly collection containing an entirely white
skull, and then, six feet away, a pair of boots, and between the two a
heap of frayed leather and of rags, cemented by brown mud.

"Come on, there's less fog already. We must hurry."

A hundred yards in front of us, among the more transparent waves of fog
that are changing places with us and hide us less and less, a shell
whistles and bursts. It has fallen in the spot we are just nearing. We
are descending, and the gradient is less steep. We go side by side. My
companion says nothing, but looks to right and to left. Then he stops
again, as he did at the top of the road. I hear his faltering voice,
almost inaudible--"What's this! We're there--this is it--"

In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared and
barren--but we are in Souchez!

The village has disappeared, nor have I seen a village go so
completely. Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and Carency, these still retained
some shape of a place, with their collapsed and truncated houses, their
yards heaped high with plaster and tiles. Here, within the framework of
slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral background in the
fog, there is no longer any shape. There is not even an end of wall,
fence, or porch that remains standing; and it amazes one to discover
that there are paving-stones under the tangle of beams, stones, and
scrap-iron. This--here--was a street.

It might have been a dirty and boggy waste near a big town, whose
rubbish of demolished buildings and its domestic refuse had been shot
here for y