In
the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a
ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of
drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and
the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des
tambours de la mort--the ruffle of the drums of death. The winding
waters of the Somme flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war
by Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Peronne, where dead bodies
floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges
and barges, and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was
a highway into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving
barges the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These
barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter's
yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I
saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on stretchers into the
wooden sheds. They were the bad cases--French boys wounded in the
abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or hopelessly
shattered.
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