The road from Gouzeaucourt to Metz is a sort of gully, a deep-dug way between high banks, and along the sides one still sees shards of old rifles, rusty helmets, bits of equipment, and mess-tins. The peasants in farming the ditches have unearthed not a few Mills' bombs which now repose in piles by the side of the road. Here also reposes a dug-up Lewis gun and various parts and bits of war's attire thrown away possibly in the stampede, perhaps however, despite an inevitable association of ideas, belonging to another moment of the war. For although the Guards re-established the line once more it broke again in the succeeding March, when once more the Germans pursued their foes through the jetsam-covered streets of Gouzeaucourt. Gouzeaucourt was evidently greatly smitten by the war. It is a very extensive village raked by the devil from end to end. It swarms now on housetop and in yard with builders and joiners. A widespread clatter ascends from every road so that the very sparrows cannot hear themselves chirp. Hundreds of white barrack-like shelters have sprung into being. But as if the villagers had not had time for small amenities, every street and alley is strewn with brickbats. The scenery of the war still holds, and November 30th could be played over again without loss of reality from the scene. The road out to Metz is quiet enough now with carts of turnips jolting along where three Novembers ago the lorries were fleeing. On the top of the bank stretches the view of a war moorland becoming once more grain-productive. To the north lies a pleasant boscage, the verdure of Havrincourt. Along the south goes the straight line and the tree-stumps which mark the Cambrai-Peronne road. Metz-en-Couture looks like a great rubbish-heap from which masses of decaying brickwork are projecting. It is much less alive than Gouzeaucourt. Its returned French peasants are however at work. Like all desolated places which are off the railway it has to depend on motor transport for the materials of reconstruction, and it is characteristically behindhand compared with towns on the railway. And Gouzeaucourt is well served by a railway from Cambrai.