hard to believe--despite the evidence at my feet--that war existed here.
The brightness of the day, the emptiness of the place, the silence--save
for the humming of the gale--denied it. And then, when we had cautiously
rounded a hummock at the top, my steel helmet was blown off--not by a
shrapnel, but by the wind! I had neglected to tighten the chin-strap.

Immediately below us I could make out scars like earthquake cracks
running across the meadows--the front trenches. Both armies were buried
like moles in these furrows. The country was spread out before us, like
a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal mound rising against
the green, or a deserted shaft-head. I was gazing at the famous
battlefield of Lens. Villages, woods, whose names came back to me as the
major repeated them, lay like cloud shadows on the sunny plain, and the
faintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, was Lens itself. I marked
it by a single white tower. And suddenly another white tower, loftier
than the first, had risen up! But even as I stared its substance seemed
to change, to dissolve, and the tower was no longer to be seen. Not
until then did I realize that a monster shell had burst beside the
trenches in front of the city. Occasionally after that there came to my
ears the muffed report of some hidden gun, and a ball like a powder-puff
lay lightly on the plain, and vanished. But even the presence of these,
oddly enough, did not rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace.

We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white wine in a sheltered
cut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gained at
such an appalling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major described
to me some features of the Lens battle, in which he had taken part.
I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at the Somme.
Though he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier, his true
passion was painting, and he drew my attention to the rare greens and