Out beyond the wood, on the hillside, in the communication-trenches and other trenches, we were enabled to comprehend the true significance of that phrase uttered so carelessly by newspaper-readers—­Notre Dame de Lorette.  The whole of the ground was in heaps.  There was no spot, literally, on which a shell had not burst.  Vegetation was quite at an end.  The shells seemed to have sterilised the earth.  There was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of any sort, not a root.  Even the rankest weeds refused to sprout in the perfect desolation.  And this was the incomparable soil of France.  The trenches meandered for miles through the pitted brown slopes, and nothing could be seen from them but vast encumbrances of barbed wire.  Knotted metal heaped on the unyielding earth!

The solitude of the communication-trenches was appalling, and the continuous roar of the French seventy-fives over our heads did not alleviate it.  In the other trenches, however, was much humanity, some of it sleeping in deep, obscure retreats, but most of it acutely alive and interested in everything.  A Captain with a shabby uniform and a strong Southern accent told us how on March 9th he and his men defended their trench in water up to the waist and lumps of ice in it knocking against their bodies.

“I was summoned to surrender,” he laughed.  “I did not surrender.  We had twenty killed and twenty-four with frostbitten feet as a result of that affair.  Yes—­March 9th.”

March 9th, 1915, obviously divided that officer’s life into two parts, and not unnaturally!

A little further on we might hear an officer speaking somewhat ardently into a telephone: 

“What are they doing with that gun?  They are shooting all over the
shop.  Tell them exactly------”

Still a little further on, and another officer would lead us to a spot where we could get glimpses of the plain.  What a plain!  Pit-heads, superb vegetation, and ruined villages—­tragic villages illustrating the glories and the transcendent common-sense of war and invasion.  That place over there is Souchez—­familiar in all mouths from Arkansas to Moscow for six months past.  What an object!  Look at St. Eloi!  Look at Angres!  Look at Neuville St. Vaast!  And look at Ablain St. Nazaire, the nearest of all!  The village of Ablain St. Nazaire seems to consist now chiefly of exposed and blackened rafters; what is left of the church sticks up precisely like a little bleached bone.  A vision horrible and incredible in the immense luxuriance of the plain!  The French have got Ablain St. Nazaire.  We may go to Ablain St. Nazaire ourselves if we will accept the risks of shelling.  Soldiers were seriously wounded there on that very day, for we saw them being carried therefrom on stretchers towards the motor-ambulance and the hospital.

After more walking of a very circuitous nature, I noticed a few bricks in the monotonous expanse of dwarf earth-mounds made by shells.