In vaults each side of
these passages men played cards on barrels, to the light of candles
stuck in bottles, or slept until their turn to fight, with gas-masks
for their pillows. Outside the Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under
Louis XIV, there were long queues of wounded men taking their turn to
the surgeons who were working in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted
roof. One day there were three thousand of them, silent, patient,
muddy, blood-stained. Blind boys or men with smashed faces swathed in
bloody rags groped forward to the dark passage leading to the vault,
led by comrades. On the grass outside lay men with leg wounds and
stomach wounds. The way past the station to the Arras-Cambrai road was
a death-trap for our transport and I saw the bodies of horses and men
horribly mangled there. Dead horses were thick on each side of an
avenue of trees on the southern side of the city, lying in their blood
and bowels. The traffic policeman on "point duty" on the Arras-Cambrai
road had an impassive face under his steel helmet, as though in
Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a little at the scream of a
shell which plunged through the gable of a corner house above him.
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