"In the morning we see boys with their
heads blown off"--that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we
had passed a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at
them with a silly smile and said, "They've copped it all right!" and
went on to the same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth
when shells had scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that
we felt a little sick in the stomach--"and in the afternoon we walk
through this garden where the birds are singing. . . There is no
sense in it. It's just midsummer madness!"
But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and
died. One of the best, as I knew him at his best.
IV
The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th
there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army
revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning
of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges
through Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to
liberate the Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-
and-land attack with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army.
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