among them as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of
broken weapons or bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles,
fire-buckets, sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical
wiring, the French and German accouterments all mutilated and
encrusted in dried mud, and among the sinister piles of clothing,
stuck together with a reddish-brown cement. And one must look out,
too, for the unexploded shells, which everywhere protrude their
noses or reveal their flanks or their bases, painted red, blue, and
tawny brown.

"That's the old Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end."
It is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes.
The sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled,
emptied, scattered to the wind. The wooden props and beams arc
splintered, and point all ways. The dug-outs are filled to the brim
with earth and with--no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed
of a river, smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have
abandoned. In one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the
guns. The wide fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of
new-turned earth, made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in
length and in breadth.

I point out to Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to
have been traversed by a giant plow. But he is absorbed to his very
vitals in the metamorphosis of the country's face.

He indicates a space in the plain with his finger, and with a
stupefied air, as though he came out of a dream--"The Red Tavern!"
It is a flat field, carpeted with broken bricks.