I saw
day by day the tidal waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred
and fifty thousand men had passed through our casualty clearing
stations, and then were not finished. I went among these men when the
blood was wet on them, and talked with hundreds of them, and heard
their individual narratives of escapes from death until my imagination
was saturated with the spirit of their conflict of body and soul. I
saw a green, downy countryside, beautiful in its summer life, ravaged
by gun-fire so that the white chalk of its subsoil was flung above the
earth and grass in a wide, sterile stretch of desolation pitted with
shell-craters, ditched by deep trenches, whose walls were hideously
upheaved by explosive fire, and littered yard after yard, mile after
mile, with broken wire, rifles, bombs, unexploded shells, rags of
uniform, dead bodies, or bits of bodies, and all the filth of battle.
I saw many villages flung into ruin or blown clean off the map. I
walked into such villages as Contalmaison, Martinpuich, Le Sars,
Thilloy, and at last Bapaume, when a smell of burning and the fumes of
explosives and the stench of dead flesh rose up to one's nostrils and
one's very soul, when our dead and German dead lay about, and newly
wounded came walking through the ruins or were carried shoulder high
on stretchers, and consciously and subconsciously the living,
unwounded men who went through these places knew that death lurked
about them and around them and above them, and at any second might
make its pounce upon their own flesh.
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