hout a pause
over Fricourt and Mametz. The high scream of a shell came through a blue
sky and ended on its downward note with a sharp crash. For a few minutes
the transport column was held up while a mass of raw flesh which a
second before had been two living men and their horses was cleared out
of the way. Then the gun wagons went at a harder pace down the road,
raising a cloud of white dust out of which I heard the curses of the
drivers, swearing in a foul way to disguise their fear.

I went through Albert many scores of times to the battlefields beyond,
and watched its process of disintegration through those years, until it
was nothing but a wild scrap heap of read brick and twisted iron, and,
in the last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had seemed
to escape all shell-fire by miraculous powers, lay buried beneath a mass
of masonry. Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme where every yard
of ground is part of the great graveyard of our youth.

So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war,
and was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers and
men who came out between one battle and another, and by "lorry-jumping"
could reach this city for a few hours of civilized life, according to
their views of civilization. To these men--boys, mostly--who had been
living in lousy ditches under hell fire, Amiens was Paradise, with
little hells for those who liked them. There were hotels in which they
could go get a bath, if they waited long enough or had the luck to be
early on the list. There were streets of shops with plate-glass windows
unbroken, shining, beautiful. There were well-dressed women walking
about, with kind eyes, and children as dainty, some of them, as in High
Street, Kensington, or Prince's Street, Edinburgh. Young officers, who
had plenty of money to spend--because there was no chance of spending
money between a row of blasted trees and a ditch in which bits of dead
men were plastered into the parapet--invaded the shops and bought fancy
soaps, razors, hair-oil, stationery, pocketbooks, knives, flash-lamps,
top-boots (at a fabulous price), khaki shirts and collars, gramophone
records, and the latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of
spending, rather than the joy of possessing, which made them go from
one shop to another in search of things they could carry hack to
the line--that and the lure of girls behind the counters, laughing,
bright-eye