I little
knew when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in
another week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and
ashes. Only a few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-
tricks. Our engineers found most of them before they were touched off,
but one went down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of
imminent danger. All through the devastated region one walked with an
uncanny feeling of an evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose
bodies had gone away. It exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in
the stench of the dugouts and in the ruins they had made.
In some few villages there were living people left behind, some
hundreds in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had
been driven in from the other villages burning around them, their own
villages, whose devastation they wept to see. I met these people who
had lived under German rule and talked with many of them--old women,
wrinkled like dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed,
with sharp cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of
French chateaux, and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger
that was not quite starvation.
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