From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

ar's E

ch (it gave a glow-worm light in the darkness), and then shouted the word "Fire!" ... One gun spoke, and then for a few seconds there was silence. Over in the German line the flares went up and down, and it was very quiet in the enemy trenches, where, perhaps, the sentries wondered at that solitary gun. Then the artillery officer gave the word of command

year of war. The last year, if we have luck. It is raining now, a soft rain swept gustily across the fields by a wind so mild after all our wild weather that it seems to have the breath of spring in it. For a little while yesterday this mildness, and the sunlight lying over the battlefields, and a strange, rare inactivity of artillery, gave one just for one second of a day-dream a sense that Peace had already come and that the victory had been won. It was queer. I

aves about me in a ruined farmyard had the moist scent of early spring. A man was wandering up a road where six months ago he would have been killed before he had gone a hundred yards. Lord! It looked like peace again! ... It was only a false mirage. There was no peace. Presently a battery began to f

hole in the earth sounded high and clear, carrying far, in an unearthly way, in this great awful loneliness of empty houses, broken churches, ruined banks and shops and restaurants, and ma

om a vaulted cellar and stared at me, and

ellar. It is strange to find you

ay of the first bombardment. That was on October 6, 1914. Before then I was not alone. I was married.

ground, coming up for light and air when there is a spell of such silence as I had listened to, and going down to the dark vaults

bombardments, alone in the abomination of desolation. It was strange how quickly she was caught on fire by a sudden passion. All the tranquillity of her face chang

nothing but humbug [la blague]. It is a trap whi

s over the way, to the chaos of old houses, once very stately a

spirit of our race as they have broken all things here. They wish to deceive us to our further ruin. There will be no peace until Germany herself is laid in ashes, and her c

nths all the fire and death that had been hurled into this city around her, and the bodies of little children in the streets, and

e at any moment a shell might come to tear them to pieces and make rags of them. Another was a buxom woman with a boy and girl holding her hands. The boy had been born t

I asked. A solitary gun boomed and sh

ed and shrugge

t all. Peace will s

ever be peac

teps of the cellar. Then she smiled, in a way that made me feel cold, for it

dun," she said. "Our sold

ouchez. The stabs of flame from our batteries were like red sparks in the deepening mist. They were like the fire in the eyes

battlefields-so many brave Scots-like "the flowers o' the forest" and last year's leaves. I heard the pipes to-day in one old barn, where a feast was on, not far from where the guns were sh

ng that threaten

ere the transport men, who get the risks but not the glory. Every man here had ridden, night after night, up to the lines of death, under shell-fire and machine-gun fire, up by Longueval and Bazentin, carry

en in the New Year of war, and bade them "wire in" to the feast before them. So in other Scottish billets the first of the New Year was kept, and to-night there is sword-dancing by kilted men as nimble as Nijinski, in their stockinged feet, and old songs

y shell-fire, deserted by all their people, who had fled two years ago. I walked down this desolation, so quiet, so dead, where there was no sound of guns, that it was like walking in Pompeii when the lava was

cer was there wit