I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St.-Nicolas and came to a sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great factory of some kind--probably for beet sugar--and then a street of small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sand-bags, and the passage from house to house and between the overturned boilers of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced outpost in the last house held by the French, on the other side of which is the enemy. As we made our way through these ruined houses we had to walk very quietly and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence was necessary, for there were German soldiers only ten yards away, with trench-mortars and bombs and rifles always ready to snipe across the walls. Through a chink no wider than my finger I could see the red-brick ruins of the houses inhabited by the enemy and the road to Douai... The road to Douai as seen through this chink was a tangle of broken bricks. The enemy was so close to Arras when the French held it that there were many places where one had to step quietly and duck one's head, or get behind the shelter of a broken wall, to avoid a sniper's bullet or the rattle of bullets from a machine-gun. As I left Arras in that November evening, darkness closed in its ruined streets and shells were crashing over the city from French guns, answered now and then by enemy batteries. But in a moment of rare silence I heard the chime of a church clock. It seemed like the sweet voice of that old-time peace in Arras before the days of its agony, and I thought of that solitary bell sounding above the ruins in a ghostly way. XV While we hung on the news from Verdun--it seemed as though the fate of the world were in Fort Douaumont--our own lists of death grew longer. In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with one hand clutching at a comrade's arm. More, and more, and more, with head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas. “O Christ!” said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a swing-bed in the ambulance-train. “Now you will be comfortable and happy,” said the R.A.M.C. orderly. The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and, grasping a strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking out on his forehead. Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told me that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the tears away and said: “I'm lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed.” So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.