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From the Wytschaete Ridge (White-sheet, as we called it) and
Messines they could see for miles across our territory, not only the
trenches, but the ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind
them and the roads through the villages. They looked straight into
Kemmel village and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched
among its ruins and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old
bones bare. Clear and vivid to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch
village and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from
Fleet Street who was cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those
Germans gazed down the roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched
for the rising of white dust which would tell them when men were
marching by--more cannon fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with
its rag of a tower, and Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny
days, German gunners with shells to spare ranged upon separate farm-
houses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing
brick about great holes.


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