I saw the little old fruit-trees of French
peasants sawn off at the base, and the tall trees along the roadsides
stretched out like dead giants to bar our passage. Enormous craters
had been blown in the roadways, which had to be bridged for our
traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the enemy's retreat.
There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this
desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand
as before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon
close approach one saw that each house was but an empty shell blown
out from cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets of the
ruins in a silence that was broken only by the sound of one's own
voice or by a few shells crashing into the gutted houses. The enemy
was in the next village, or the next but one, with a few field-guns
and a rear-guard of machine-gunners.
In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with
objects lying amid the litter, he had left "booby traps" to blow our
men to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked
up a fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid
was eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge.
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