“Hello!” I said.  “Was there a cottage here?”

No!  What I had discovered was the illustrious chapel of Notre Dame de Lorette.

Then we were in a German trench which the French had taken and transformed into one of their own trenches by turning its face.  It had a more massive air than the average French trench, and its cellarage, if I may use this civilian word, was deeper than that of any French trench.  The officers said that often a German trench was taken before the men resting in those profound sleeping-holes could get to the surface, and that therefore they only emerged in order to be killed or captured.

After more heavy trudging we came to trenches abandoned by the Germans and not employed by the French, as the front had moved far beyond them.  The sides were dilapidated.  Old shirts, bits of uniform, ends of straps, damaged field-glass cases, broken rifles, useless grenades lay all about.  Here and there was a puddle of greenish water.  Millions of flies, many of a sinister bright burnished green, were busily swarming.  The forlornness of these trenches was heartrending.  It was the most dreadful thing that I saw at the front, surpassing the forlornness of any destroyed village whatsoever.  And at intervals in the ghastly residue of war arose a smell unlike any other smell. ...  A leg could be seen sticking out of the side of the trench.  We smelt a number of these smells, and saw a number of these legs.  Each leg was a fine leg, well-clad, and superbly shod in almost new boots with nail-protected soles.  Each leg was a human leg attached to a human body, and at the other end of the body was presumably a face crushed in the earth.  Two strokes with a pick, and the corpses might have been excavated and decently interred.  But not one had been touched.  Buried in frenzied haste by amateur, imperilled grave-diggers with a military purpose, these dead men decayed at leisure amid the scrap-heap, the cess-pit, the infernal squalor which once had been a neat, clean, scientific German earthwork, and which still earlier had been part of a fair countryside.  The French had more urgent jobs on hand than the sepulture of these victims of a caste and an ambition.  So they liquefied into corruption in their everlasting boots, proving that there is nothing like leather.  They were a symbol.  With alacrity we left them to get forward to the alert, straining life of war.

V The British Lines

You should imagine a large plain, but not an empty plain, nor a plain entirely without hills.  There are a few hills, including at least one very fine eminence (an agreeable old town on the top), with excellent views of the expanse.  The expanse is considerably diversified.  In the first place it is very well wooded; in the second place it is very well cultivated; and in the third place it is by no means uninhabited.  Villages abound in it; and small market towns are not