nything so passionate, so violent, as from that
gunner officer. His view of the business was summed up in the word
"murder." He raged against the impossible orders sent down from
headquarters, against the brutality with which men were left in the line
week after week, and against the monstrous, abominable futility of all
our so-called strategy. His nerves were in rags, as I could see by the
way in which his hand shook when he lighted one cigarette after
another. His spirit was in a flame of revolt against the misery of his
sleeplessness, filth, and imminent peril of death. Every shell that
burst near Henin sent a shudder through him. I stayed an hour in his
hut, and then went away toward Neuville-Vitasse with harassing fire
following along the way. I looked back many times to the valley, and to
the ridges where the enemy lived above it, invisible but deadly. The
sun was setting and there was a tawny glamour in the sky, and a mystical
beauty over the landscape despite the desert that war had made there,
leaving only white ruins and slaughtered trees where once there were
good villages with church spires rising out of sheltering woods. The
German gunners were doing their evening hate. Crumps were bursting
heavily again amid our gun positions.

Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places of extreme
unhealthfulness where our men had fought their way up to the Hindenburg
line, or, as the Germans called it, the Siegfried line. Croisille and
Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among the
ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived close to these places,
stayed there too long to dodge them always. They were inhabitants, not
visitors. The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured
it after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge
against tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were
held up on the left while they went forward and were slaughtered. The
4th Australian Division lost three thousand men in an experimental
attack directed by the Fifth Army. They made their gun emplacements
in the Noreuil Valley, the valley of death as they called it, and
Australian gunners made little slit trenches and scuttled into them when
the Germans ranged on their batteries, blowing gun spokes and wheels and
breech-blocks into the air. Queant, the bastion of the Hindenburg line,
stared straight down the valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when
I went wal