On the right ran the main road--the one feature of the whole pitiful panorama which still retained some individuality. Once it had been famous for its avenue of tall trees. Those trees still flanked the roadway, but now the tallest of them was a ravaged stump standing a bare four feet above the ground, and the same gun-fire that had smitten them down had smashed the road itself into a sickly yellow pulp. Once, no doubt, the road had run between fields green with grass or young corn; but now it seemed to Isobel beyond imagining that life could ever again come near to it. Even the vilest weed might shudder to grow on earth's dead body, mangled and corrupted and shamefully exposed.... Alf's voice broke the silence. "It's a bit dull 'ere, miss," he said, with cheerful bathos. "There ain't much to show yer. But see yon mound over there on the left? That was a church once, that was. But you can 'unt all day and never find nothing of the buildin', all except the church bell;--on'y it's too far to walk in them boots. One of our C.T.'s--communication trenches, I should say--runs right underneath it." Isobel gave no answer, unless a sound something between a gulp and a sob can be so described. Depths seemed to be stirring in her nature that she had not hitherto been conscious of possessing. She felt mean and small and bitterly humbled. She had desired to see the front out of mere heedless curiosity, as a child might wish to visit a slaughter-house. She had had her desire, and her eyes had seen unimaginable horrors--horrors which had become so much a commonplace to the men who passed their lives in this shambles that they apologized for its lack of greater horrors. Compared with what they had seen, there was "nothing much" here for her curious eye. Only a strip of ground fought over a month before--its dead buried, its wounded carried away to a smiling land where such as she were flattered and praised in the public press because out of their useless lives they deigned to devote an occasional hour to those same wounded. A sudden horror came over her lest she should see a dead man. She covered her eyes with her hands and gave a convulsive shudder. "Don't--don't take me over there!" she said, and climbed down the steps again into the trench. Bill and Alf, much concerned to understand what could possibly have upset their visitor, were on the point of following, when there was a sound of squelching mud, and a figure appeared round the angle of the trench. "Lumme!" said Bill's voice in an appalled whisper. "The orficer!" With one accord the two Tommies turned and fled as their platoon commander approached.