We walked over the mud heaps and litter that had once been houses towards the centre of Dompierre village, and tried to picture to ourselves what the place had been.  Many things are recognisable in Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for instance, there are quire large triangular pieces of the church wall upstanding at Dompierre.  And a mile away perhaps down the hill on the road towards Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery are very distinct.  A sugar refinery is an affair of big iron receptacles and great flues and pipes and so forth, and iron does not go down under gun fire as stone or brick does.  The whole fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell holes, that raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at the bottom of the sea.

There wasn’t a dog left of the former life of Dompierre.  There was not even much war traffic that morning on the worn and muddy road.  The guns muttered some miles away to the west, and a lark sang.  But a little way farther on up the road was an intermediate dressing station, rigged up with wood and tarpaulins, and orderlies were packing two wounded men into an ambulance.  The men on the stretchers were grey faced, as though they had been trodden on by some gigantic dirty boot.

As we came back towards where our car waited by the cemetery I heard the jingle of a horseman coming across the space behind us.  I turned and beheld one of the odd contrasts that seem always to be happening in this incredible war.  This man was, I suppose, a native officer of some cavalry force from French north Africa.  He was a handsome dark brown Arab, wearing a long yellow-white robe and a tall cap about which ran a band of sheepskin.  He was riding one of those little fine lean horses with long tails that I think are Barbary horses, his archaic saddle rose fore and aft of him, and the turned-up toes of his soft leather boots were stuck into great silver stirrups.  He might have ridden straight out of the Arabian nights.  He passed thoughtfully, picking his way delicately among the wire and the shell craters, and coming into the road, broke into a canter and vanished in the direction of the smashed-up refinery.

2

About such towns as Rheims or Arras or Soissons there is an effect of waiting stillness like nothing else I have ever experienced.  At Arras the situation is almost incredible to the civilian mind.  The British hold the town, the Germans hold a northern suburb; at one point near the river the trenches are just four metres apart.  This state of tension has lasted for long months.