The line of men turned at last into a long deep-cut communication trench leading out into a village. The air in the trench was heavy and close and stagnant, and the men toiled wearily up it, sweating and breathing hard. At a branching fork one path was labelled with a neatly printed board 'To Battn. H.Q. and the Mole Heap,' and the other path 'To the Duck Pond'--this last, the name of a trench, being a reminder of the winter and the wet. The officer leading the party turned into the trench for 'The Mole Heap,' walked up it, and emerged into the sunlight of the grass-grown village street, skirted a house, crossed the street by a trench, and passed through a hole chipped out of the brick wall into a house, the men tramping at his heels. The whole village was seamed with a maze of trenches, but these were only for use when the shelling had been particularly heavy. At other times people moved about the place by paths sufficiently well protected by houses and walls against the rifle bullets that had practically never ceased to smack into the village for many months past. These paths wandered behind buildings, across gardens, into and out of houses either by doors or by holes in the wall, over or round piles of rubble or tumbled brick-work, burrowed at times below ground-level on patches exposed to fire, ran frequently through a dozen cottages on end, passage having been effected simply by hacking holes through the connecting brick walls, in one place dived underground down some short stairs and took its way through several cellars by the same simple method of walking through the walls from one cellar to another. The houses were littered with empty and rusty tins, torn and dirty clothing, ash-choked stoves, trampled straw, and broken furniture. The back-yards and gardens were piled with heaps of bricks and tiles, biscuit and jam tins; broken fences and rotted rags were overrun with a rank growth of grass and weeds and flowers, pitted with shell-holes and strewn with graves. The whole village was wrecked from end to end, was no more than a charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked and bulged and broken.