Another French captain joined us and became the guide.
"This road is often 'Marmite,'" he said, "but I have escaped so often
I have a kind of fatalism."
I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch shells which a few
minutes before had burst in our immediate neighborhood, cutting off
twigs of trees and one branch with a scatter of steel as sharp as
knives and as heavy as sledge-hammers.
Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, which
afterward I passed through scores of times on the way to Vimy when
that ridge was ours. The ragged ruin of its church was white and
ghostly in the mist. On the right of the winding road which led
through it was Souchez Wood, all blasted and riven, and beyond a
huddle of bricks which once was Souchez village.
"Our men have fallen on every yard of this ground," said the French
officer. "Their bodies lie thick below the soil. Poor France! Poor
France!"
He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the vision of all
that youth of France which even then, in March of '16, had been
offered up in vast sacrifice to the greedy devils of war.
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