To reach
them one waded through swamps and pools. Just beyond them there was
always the moonlit stretch of water, now narrow, now wide.
I was to see other trenches later on, French and English. But only
along the inundation was there that curious combination of beauty and
hideousness, of rippling water with the moonlight across it in a
silver path, and in that water things that had been men.
In one place a cow and a pig were standing on ground a little bit
raised. They had been there for weeks between the two armies. Neither
side would shoot them, in the hope of some time obtaining them for
food.
They looked peaceful, rather absurd.
Now so near that one felt like whispering, and now a quarter of a mile
away, were the German trenches. We moved under their _fusees_, passing
destroyed towns where shell holes have become vast graves.
One such town was most impressive. It had been a very beautiful town,
rather larger than the others. At the foot of the main street ran the
railroad embankment and the line of trenches. There was not a house
left.
It had been, but a day or two before, the scene of a street fight,
when the Germans, swarming across the inundation, had captured the
trenches at the railroad and got into the town itself.
At the intersection of two streets, in a shell hole, twenty bodies had
been thrown for burial.
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