In each of the yards of the better-class dwellings and farms, including the grounds of the château and brewery, were graves of German soldiers. Many of these were marked with rude crosses bearing touching inscriptions. One such epitaph that caught my eye described the dead soldier as a good comrade; another as a brave man who had died for the Fatherland. Many of them bore a simple religious touch. One grave covered a German officer, buried by the French after the capture of the town. The French soldiers had marked his name and a respectful word or two on the rude cross above it, in obvious keeping with the inscriptions the Germans had written on adjacent crosses raised while they were in occupation. In an effort to tell me how full the redoubts were of German dead, when Vermelles was at last taken, my soldier guide found that words failed him. They were everywhere, he said. [Illustration: A winter Cavalry shelter in France] [Illustration: Construction of Cavalry shelter in France] Many of the graves, particularly those of the French soldiers buried thereabouts, were headed by black or white metal wreaths. "It cost dear," said my soldier, "and we paid. But a Boche who lived through the last few days of the fighting here, and escaped from that last charge, will be able to tell a story." The deep cellar of a ruined house--a mere brick arched cell of a place without a ray of daylight--had been quite habitably fitted up as a cave-dwelling by the Germans, who had saved a piano from one of the wrecked rooms above and cosily stowed it away in a corner. One or two underground caves just back of the German front line of trenches, bomb-proofs for the officers apparently, were ingeniously secure. Though Vermelles at the time of our visit had been in French hands for more than a month, one could find many such souvenirs as shell-heads and timing-fuses without troubling to stir the piles of wreckage. I could, I thought, sit in Vermelles and write reams of detail in description of the terrible havoc of war, but I found that mere generality as to the scenes of desolation wrought in the town soon used up my vocabulary. The place was no less a graveyard of brave men than of strenuous human effort, none the less to be admired because it proved abortive. Over all brooded the horror of war and the more specific and tangible horror of gun-fire. "Low trajectory and high explosive are twin demons, and this is their devil's work," the shattered town seemed to say. Knots of French soldiers or visiting British officers walked about sombrely and spoke in low tones, as if in the actual presence of the dead, in spite of the weeks that had flown by since Vermelles had echoed to the crash of a bursting shell.