passing endless lorries and Red Cross waggons and troops and dug-out camps.  As we get closer the signs of shelling get worse, and children are seen no longer.  Old men, though, occasionally observed working in a field quite unperturbed.  Rarely a French soldier or an interpreter with his sphinx badges.  All this quite lost on Hunt, who has “quite got used to abroad, thank you, sir.”  He is eating chocolate or something, half a horse-length (the correct distance) behind me.

Now on our left is a famous ridge, with a ruined village on the top.  Not, you understand, a ridge in the Swiss sense, but rather in the Norfolk sense.  I should like to go and see it, but it’s too open to the Boche’s eye, and I don’t want to dismount yet.  So we curve round right-handed a bit.  Aha!  “To ——.”  Nous voila!  Follow down this muddy track under cover of the ridge, and we arrive at ——.  A wood just beyond the little town.  Oh, mournful wood!  “Bois epais, redouble ton ombre.”  But they say the anemones and the primroses were as merry and sweet as ever this spring.  Bravo little wood!

The village is, of course, evacuated by all inhabitants.  The houses all in ruins.  By now all the remaining windows have been boarded up and the blown-out doors barred against prying eyes.  Here we are at an old estaminet called “Aux Coeurs joyeux.”  There’s hardly anything but the sign left.  At the cross-roads in the centre of the town is the church, so dismal.  No roof, pillars broken and lying about the floor amongst debris of broken images, chairs, and muddy rubble.

[Sidenote:  PLOEGSTEERT]

As I am coming out I turn over the hand of an image, and underneath it what the deuce is this?  Why, a fragment of an old picture, torn and decaying away.  What shall I do?  Leave it to rot?  Give it to ...  Yes, exactly ... to whom?  And would anyone thank me for it?  Just a head of St. John, very battered and faded.  It’s a fragment about a foot square, and through all the mud one can see something like this:  A head of St. John in the corner; rays of light (two very thin small rays) shining on him, and a look of great suffering on his face.  The background a sort of dull ochre.  Evidently once a large composition.  There are two books, one with EVAN, and the other with, I think, BIBLIA SACRA, written on it.  It is quite worthless except from a sentimental point of view.

The exposure and the heat of the explosions have sadly cracked and peeled the paint, but it seems vaguely symbolical.  Near here I picked up some minute bits of green glass.

However, there was a notice:  “It is dangerous to loiter here.”  So I tore myself away, and we remounted.  The Boche can’t see into the town because of the remaining buildings, but the whole place is utterly empty—­not a dog even.