man dead
lay in heaps. There were twelve hundred corpses littered over the earth
below Loupart Wood, in one mass, and eight hundred of them were German.
I could not walk without treading on them there. When I fell in the
slime I clutched arms and legs. The stench of death was strong and
awful.

But our men who had escaped death and shell-shock kept their sanity
through all this wilderness of slaughter, kept--oh, marvelous!--their
spirit of humor, their faith in some kind of victory. I was with the
Australians on that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they brought
out trophies like men at a country fair... I remember an Australian
colonel who came riding with a German beer-mug at his saddle... Next
day, though shells were still bursting in the ruins, some Australian
boys set up some painted scenery which they had found among the rubbish,
and chalked up the name of the "Coo-ee Theater."

The enemy was in retreat to his Hindenburg line, over a wide stretch
of country which he laid waste behind him, making a desert of French
villages and orchards and parks, so that even the fruit-trees were cut
down, and the churches blown up, and the graves ransacked for their
lead. It was the enemy's first retreat on the western front, and that
ferocious fighting of the British troops had smashed the strongest
defenses ever built in war, and our raw recruits had broken the most
famous regiments of the German army, so in spite of all tragedy and
all agony our men were not downcast, but followed up their enemy with a
sense of excitement because it seemed so much like victory and the end
of war.

When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, where so many boys of the
56th (London) Division had fallen on the 1st of July, I went through
that evil place by way of Fonquevillers (which we called "Funky
Villas"), and, stumbling over the shell-craters and broken trenches and
dead bodies between the dead masts of slashed and branchless trees,
came into the open country to our outpost line. I met there a friendly
sergeant who surprised me by referring in a casual way to a little old
book of mine.

"This place," he said, glancing at me, "is a strange Street of
Adventure."

It reminded me of another reference to that tale of mine when I was
among a crowd of London lads who had just been engaged in a bloody fight
at a place called The Hairpin.

A young officer sent for me and I found him in the loft of a stinking
barn, sitting in a tub as n