dwelling-place at that time, with other war correspondents, was in an
old white chateau between St.-Pol and Hesdin, from which we motored out
to the line, Arras way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer Street.
The contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond was profound
and bewildering. Behind the old white house were winding walks through
little woods beside the stream which Henry crossed on his way to
Agincourt; tapestried in early spring with bluebells and daffodils and
all the flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in the springtime of
France. Birds sang their love-songs in the thickets. The tits twittered
fearfully at the laugh of the jay. All that beauty was like a sharp pain
at one's heart after hearing the close tumult of the guns and trudging
over the blasted fields of war, in the routine of our task, week by
week, month by month.

"This makes for madness," said a friend of mine, a musician surprised
to find himself a soldier. "In the morning we see boys with their heads
blown off"--that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we had
passed a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at them
with a silly smile and said, "They've copped it all right!" and went on
to the same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth when shells
had scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that we felt a
little sick in the stomach--"and in the afternoon we walk through this
garden where the birds are singing... There is no sense in it. It's just
midsummer madness!"

But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and
died. One of the best, as I knew him at his best.

IV

The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th
there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army
revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning
of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges through
Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to liberate the
Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-and-land attack
with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first blow at
the Messines Ridge was completely and wonderfully successful, due to
the explosion of seventeen enormous mines under the German positions,
followed by an attack "in depth," divisions passing through each other,
or "leap-frogging," as it was called, to the final objectives against an
enemy demoralized by th