After the trenches of Anzac, you are overwhelmed in France with the pathos of the contiguity of trench with dwelling. It is less unnatural that the unpeopled wilderness of Anzac should be torn by shell and scarred by trench-line. In France there is a piteous incongruity in the intimacy of warfare with domesticity. The village that has been the stronghold is shattered beyond all reviving; and inevitably the villages of the fighting area have been used as a fleeting shelter from the fierceness of the tempest of shell. _L'Église_ is a roofless ruin. _L'Hôtel de Ville_ and _la Marie_ are amorphous masses of jagged and crumpled wall. The trenches traverse the street and the garden and the _cour de maison_. The tiny rivulet on the outskirts of the village has been hailed as a sort of ready-made trench and hastily squared and fire-stepped. The farm is pocked with shell-holes; the farmhouse is notoriously open to the heavens and gaping about the estate through its rent walls. On Anzac only the chalk ridges were scored and the stunted, uncertain growth uprooted; there were not even trees to maim. Here the cellars are natural dug-outs in the trench-wall; the _maison_ is the billet for the reserve battalion; the communication trench ploughs rudely through the quiet cobbled street. The desecrating contrast cries from the ground at every turn. The village that used to sleep in the sun with its pleasant crops about it now sleeps in ashes and ruination for ever. The battle-lines of Turkey will be effaced and overgrown by the seasons, but that which was a village in France will never more know the voices of little children again in its streets, because it has no streets, and because new villages will be built rather than this hideousness overturned and effaced and built-upon afresh. If you walk east an hour from Arras you'll get near enough to Tilloy to see the shelling of our line. Again Anzac is superseded. Anzac never saw shell of this size (except from the monitors that bombarded from the sea); nor did Anzac know bombardment of this intensity, except in isolated spurts. Here the normal bombardment is intense. This is mere routine; but it's as fierce as preceded any attack on Gallipoli. What chance has the individual when modern artillery is at work? Yet the chance of death cannot be greater than say, one in four; otherwise there would be no men left. The rank of balloons is spotting; the 'planes are patrolling them; other 'planes are circling over our batteries--spotting; others are going in squadron over the line--"on some stunt," as Tommy puts it. Our own guns are speaking all about, so loud that the noise of crowding transport is altogether drowned: by them, and by the crack of the German bursts and by the shell-scream. The transport on this road is not mechanical; we are too near the line for that.