Glencorse Wood goes down to Inverness Copse. It was the dreadful odour of dead men. It rose in gusts and waves and eddies over all this ground, for the battlefield was strewn with dead. I saw many German bodies in the fields of the Somme, and on the way out from Arras, and on the Vimy Ridge, but never in such groups as lay about the pill-boxes and the shell-craters of the salient. Everywhere they lay half buried in the turmoil of earth, or stark above ground without any cover to hide them. They lay with their heads flung back into water-filled craters or with their legs dangling in deep pools. They were blown into shapeless masses of raw flesh by our artillery. Heads and legs and arms all coated in clay lay without bodies far from where the men of whom they had been part were killed. God knows what agonies were suffered before death by men shut up in those German blockhouses, like Fitzclarence Farm, and Herenthage Château, and Clapham Junction, which I passed on the way up. Some of the garrisons had not stayed in the blockhouses until our troops had reached them. Perhaps the concussion of our drum-fire was worse inside those concrete walls than outside. Perhaps the men had rushed out hoping to surrender before our troops were on them, or with despairing courage had brought their machine-guns into the open to kill our first waves before their own death. Whatever their motive had been, many of these men had come out, and they lay in heaps, mangled by shell-fire that came across the fields to them in a deep belt of high explosives. Here under the sky they lay, a frightful witness against modern civilization, a bloody challenge to any gospel of love which men profess to believe. Over Nonne Boschen and Inverness Copse, and Polygon Wood beyond, and the long claw-like hook of the Passchendaele Ridge, the sky was clear at times and the water-pools reflected its light. But these places had no touch of loveliness because of the light. Once in history meek-eyed women walked in Nonne Boschen, which was Nun's Wood, and in Inverness Copse, as we call it, maids went with their mates in the glades. Now they are places haunted by ghastly memories, and there rises from them a miasma which sickens one's soul. Yet bright above the evil of them and clean above their filth there is the memory of that youth of ours who came here through fire and flame and fell here, so that the soil is sacred as their field of honour.