Round about, over all this ground below Notre Dame de Lorette and the
fields round Souchez, the French had fought ferociously, burrowing
below earth at the Labyrinth--sapping, mining, gaining a network of
trenches, an isolated house, a huddle of ruins, a German sap-head, by
frequent rushes and the frenzy of those who fight vith their teeth and
hands, flinging themselves on the bodies of their enemy, below ground
in the darkness, or above ground between ditches and sand-bags. So for
something like fifteen months they fought, by Souchez and the
Labyrinth, until in February of '16 they went away after greeting our
khaki men who came into their old places and found the bones and
bodies of Frenchmen there, as I found, white, rat-gnawed bones, in
disused trenches below Notre Dame when the rain washed the earth down
and uncovered them.
XIV
It was then, in that February of '15, that the city of Arras passed
for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our
strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will be haunted
forever by the ghosts of those men of ours whom I saw there on many
days of grim fighting, month after month, in snow and sun and rain, in
steel helmets and stink-coats, in muddy khaki and kilts, in queues of
wounded (three thousand at a time outside the citadel), in billets
where their laughter and music were scornful of high velocities, in
the surging tide of traffic that poured through to victory that cost
as much sometimes as defeat.
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