At Ablainzville the new brick cabins grow into being amid the high seared masts of her dead trees. At sunset the hard-working peasants are still in the fields. They have heaped old iron and wire on to the roads, and filled up the shell-holes and burned the weeds and broken the intractable hard moorland with tractor-drawn ploughs. They have riven the sturdy roots of the docks and the reeds, they have driven St. John's wort and rocket and willow-herb from the grain-field, turning up the tramped-down battered earth in huge slabs and chunks. The league of death which goes over the brow of the hill, that old no-man's land which the machine-guns swept is now a great black upturned drive of ploughing in which alight thousands of crows, all extruding from the earth and discussing what they find, talking and grabbing, fluttering and flying. Sodden green equipment has been ploughed into the earth and still lies half exposed, and helmets like little coal-buckets disturb here and there the even surface of the land. It is heavy going, and your boots want to lift tons of mother earth, but you struggle on with eyes furtively engaged in "spotting" here a shell and there a bomb. Next year the corn will cover up all our sins. The peasants complain that the Government gives them nothing. The Germans replaced some of the cattle they stole, but how about the French who commandeered their horses at the beginning of the war and in exchange gave them a merely nominal sum. In the stricken areas how few are the horses now! The conservative peasant who does not like changing his agricultural habits has been forced to the use of the petrol engine. His chief motive force is the old lorry engine. But of course he does more with that than he did with the horse, and when one has walked right across the zone of desolation and come to the little-touched farms on the other side one cannot but feel that the peasants working their horses there are not getting on so quickly as the deprived ones with their motors.