They laid them out in rows, by wards. Some were dying. Some died on the way. Some died in the grass, cut by the bitter wind as they lay there gazing into the unkindly heaven. The rain came in frozen gusts. Those still hovering on the border-line were blown and soaked into death. The groaning of the wounded was hideous. Shattered limbs are hard to bear in the complete comfort of a civilian hospital. What is a wounded man to do but die, exposed to the pelting rain of the Somme winter? Brandy and hot tea and cigarettes brought a transient consolation: most men were insensible to aid from such fragmentary comfort. It began to be plain that the risk from shell-fire was not more dangerous than this from exposure; a return was ordered. Sisters, doctors, patients, concurred with equal fervour. And so they were taken back. The shelling had ceased. Next morning came the ambulance-train. CHAPTER IV THE FOUGHTEN FIELD I visited the fields of Beaumont-Hamel and Miraumont and Bapaume soon after they had been abandoned, in the pleasant sunshine of an April Sabbath afternoon. It was the abomination of desolation I saw--and felt. Of Beaumont-Hamel there was not a stone left standing, it was not until I had been told that a village once stood there that I began to distinguish the powdered rubble from its surroundings. There was difficulty in doing that, for not only were the buildings demolished, but their bricks crunched and crumbled. As we approached the old line from ----, the degrees of demolition in the villages showed clearly how near they had stood to the field of fire, and how systematic had been the German bombardment. The remoter villages showed merely sporadic gaps in the walls--which might have been the result of accident rather than of purpose--or a church spire tottering. Nearer villages showed large areas containing not more than the skeletons of houses. The villages which had been in occupation--such as Beaumont-Hamel itself--had not one stone left upon another. The twisted wire straggled through them; the battered trenches wormed about. We left the car at Miraumont and walked up the old road overlooking the village and Grandcourt Wood. They call it a road for the sake of topography. But did you ever see ring-barked trees standing in a morass?--that is it, with this difference: that these trees are branchless. You can conceive nothing more gaunt and desolate than that colony of splintered trunks standing down in the grassless valley of pools. The pools are shell-holes, so frequent that they have the aspect of a morass striated by thin ridges of black mud. The ridges are the lips of shell-holes. Miraumont stands down the slope above the wood. It is less completely ruined than Beaumont-Hamel, but by that the more pathetic to look on. You can see what it has been: you cannot judge what Beaumont-Hamel may have been.