We had come down to Demart, the little village on the edge of No-Man’s Land, from which the offensive had started. The houses were bent and twisted. Their roofs were gone and their walls gaped with ugly holes where shells had torn through them. Of those which still stood, there was scarcely one which had not had a side taken out. Some of them were in flames; others had caved in and sprawled black and smouldering.. The ruins were filled with poisonous odours, gas, blood, decay, the fumes of explosives. Yet one noted the heroism of the little gardens which had somehow contrived to outlive this hell. Trees were dead and stood limply with their arms blown off or hanging laboriously at their sides by a shred; but flowers still smiled and lifted up their faces. All along the streets, outside improvised dressing-stations, our wounded lay on stretchers. There was no moaning—no giving way to pity. However terrible their wounds, they rested there in the sun with the blood drying on their cheeks, perfectly motionless and apparently happy that for a time their fighting days were ended. They were mostly blue and gray-eyed men, simple and childish looking in their helplessness. The stretcher-bearers were Hun prisoners, depressed fellows, who perspired freely beneath their enormous steel helmets and the bulky haversacks which they carried on their shoulders. They plodded to and fro like dumb animals, docile, obedient and eager to ingratiate themselves. One wondered why at dawn we should have attempted to kill each other, when a few hours later we could get along so comfortably. On the far side of the village we began to climb the heavily entrenched slope, which the enemy had held that morning. Nothing of his trench-system was left. The shell-holes were nearly all fresh and stretched lip to lip as far as Dodo Wood, proving the accuracy and intensity of our barrage. However many men had perished, hardly a trace of them was left; they had been buried by the unseen thing that had murdered them. At the edge of Dodo Wood a mounted man met us, bringing a message that the battalion we were supporting would probably attack at noon, and appointing as our place of rendezvous a deep ravine several miles ahead. We had lost so much time through halts in the traffic that it was already very nearly eleven. If we were to keep our appointment, our only chance was to strike off to the left across country and risk being still further delayed by wire entanglements and shell-holes. We picked up the track of one of our tanks and followed it round the edge of a high plateau.