that was broken only by the sound of one's own voice or by a
few shells crashing into the gutted houses. The enemy was in the next
village, or the next but one, with a few field-guns and a rear-guard of
machine-gunners.

In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with
objects lying amid the litter, he had left "booby traps" to blow our men
to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a
fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was
eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. I little
knew when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in
another week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and ashes.
Only a few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-tricks. Our
engineers found most of them before they were touched off, but one went
down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of imminent danger. All
through the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling of an
evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose bodies had gone away. It
exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts
and in the ruins they had made.

In some few villages there were living people left behind, some hundreds
in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had been driven
in from the other villages burning around them, their own villages,
whose devastation they wept to see. I met these people who had lived
under German rule and talked with many of them--old women, wrinkled
like dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed, with sharp
cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of French chateaux,
and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger that was not quite
starvation. It was from these people that I learned a good deal about
the psychology of German soldiers during the battles of the Somme.
They told me of the terror of these men at the increasing fury of our
gun-fire, of their desertion and revolt to escape the slaughter, and
of their rage against the "Great People" who used them for gun-fodder.
Habitually many of them talked of the war as the "Great Swindle." These
French civilians hated the Germans in the mass with a cold, deadly
hatred. They spoke with shrill passion at the thought of German
discipline, fines, punishments, requisitions, which they had suffered
in these years. The hope of vengeance was like water to parched throats.
Yet I noticed that nearly