"Are you afraid of the shells?" I asked. They grimaced up at the sky
and giggled. They had got used to the hell of it all, and dodged death
as they would a man with a whip, shouting with laughter beyond the
length of his lash. In one of the vaulted cellars underground, when
English soldiers first went in, there lived a group of girls who gave
them wine to drink, and kisses for a franc or two, and the Circe cup
of pleasure, if they had time to stay. Overhead shells were howling.
Their city was stricken with death. These women lived like witches in
a cave--a strange and dreadful life.
I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to a
sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great
factory of some kind--probably for beet sugar--and then a street of
small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own
suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and
houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sand-
bags, and the passage from house to house and between the overturned
boilers of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced
outpost in the last house held by the French, on the other side of
which is the enemy.
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