By the roadside lie shells which failed to explode, shells in their cases which were never despatched on their mission of death, shells sticking nose deep in the clay with their bases showing through the weeds. Near these are gun emplacements with the guns still in their original positions pointing back towards the locality where the British troops are at present billeted in their many rest areas. Here is a mill, its walls down, a brewery silent and deserted, a sugar refinery with its girders twisted and bent, its framework stripped of all covering, its iron bowels naked to the sky. It is hard to picture this spread of world being other at any time than a wild desolate waste, covered with broken homes, rusty limbers and waggons, with ghastly spiked contraptions of war, chevaux de frise, distorted entanglements, trip wires hidden in the weeds, snares for unwary feet, and grotesque ill-proportioned dug-outs, with doors askew and roofs falling in. Elbows of trench suddenly gape by the roadside and as suddenly cease. At one time these were parts of a well-proportioned alley, set with fire-bay and traverse, boarded floor and well-built parapet, running for mile after mile in one continuous crooked line from the steep Vosges of the South to the sand dunes of the North. Here was a sap that once stretched across No Man's Land, there was a front line, and further back, crawling through holt and hamlet, all that remained of a communication trench could be dimly discerned. The hamlet was now a medley of tortured beams and fallen bricks, the holt a congregation of peeled stumps that in the distance looked like an assemblage of lepers, and sap, fire-bay and communication trench were defaced, disfigured, their shapeless ruin adding to the ravage which had deformed the face of the country. In imagination I could picture the country in days of peace with its rich pastures and fields of corn, its long roads lined with rows of magnificent trees, its hedgerows, dykes and canals, its populous villages where the bells of eventide called the faithful to prayer. This and much more could be pictured, the snug farmhouses, with their ricks of hay, the red-tiled cottages, the merry cafés, the shrines by the roadside, the windmills circling to the breeze, the old men smoking their long-shanked pipes, the women, bravely arrayed in mutch caps and white aprons, carrying on the work of their household, the children playing.... Where were the children now?