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France at War - On the Frontier of Civilization by Rudyard Kipling
page 47 of 63 (74%)
squad with a captured machine-gun which they tested in a
sheltered dip; armourers at their benches busy with sick
rifles; fatigue-parties for straw, rations, and ammunition;
long processions of single blue figures turned sideways
between the brown sunless walls. One understood after a while
the nightmare that lays hold of trench-stale men, when the
dreamer wanders for ever in those blind mazes till, after
centuries of agonizing flight, he finds himself stumbling out
again into the white blaze and horror of the mined front--he
who thought he had almost reached home!

IN THE FRONT LINE

There were no trees above us now. Their trunks lay along the
edge of the trench, built in with stones, where necessary, or
sometimes overhanging it in ragged splinters or bushy tops.
Bits of cloth, not French, showed, too, in the uneven lines of
debris at the trench lip, and some thoughtful soul had marked
an unexploded Boche trench-sweeper as "not to be touched." It
was a young lawyer from Paris who pointed that out to me.

We met the Colonel at the head of an indescribable pit of
ruin, full of sunshine, whose steps ran down a very steep
hillside under the lee of an almost vertically plunging
parapet. To the left of that parapet the whole hillside was
one gruel of smashed trees, split stones, and powdered soil.
It might have been a rag-picker's dump-heap on a colossal
scale.

Alan looked at it critically. I think he had helped to make
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