and Red Cross waggons and troops and dug-out camps. As we get closer the
signs of shelling get worse, and children are seen no longer. Old men,
though, occasionally observed working in a field quite unperturbed.
Rarely a French soldier or an interpreter with his sphinx badges. All
this quite lost on Hunt, who has "quite got used to abroad, thank you,
sir." He is eating chocolate or something, half a horse-length (the
correct distance) behind me.

Now on our left is a famous ridge, with a ruined village on the top.
Not, you understand, a ridge in the Swiss sense, but rather in the
Norfolk sense. I should like to go and see it, but it's too open to the
Boche's eye, and I don't want to dismount yet. So we curve round
right-handed a bit. Aha! "To ----." Nous voilà! Follow down this muddy
track under cover of the ridge, and we arrive at ----. A wood just
beyond the little town. Oh, mournful wood! "Bois épais, redouble ton
ombre." But they say the anemones and the primroses were as merry and
sweet as ever this spring. Bravo little wood!

The village is, of course, evacuated by all inhabitants. The houses all
in ruins. By now all the remaining windows have been boarded up and the
blown-out doors barred against prying eyes. Here we are at an old
estaminet called "Aux Coeurs joyeux." There's hardly anything but the
sign left. At the cross-roads in the centre of the town is the church,
so dismal. No roof, pillars broken and lying about the floor amongst
débris of broken images, chairs, and muddy rubble.

[Sidenote: PLOEGSTEERT]

As I am coming out I turn over the hand of an image, and underneath it
what the deuce is this? Why, a fragment of an old picture, torn and