Afterwards we heard that
she was a native who had returned to have a look at her home.
We were billeted at the rear of the village on the ground floor of a
cottage. Behind our billet was the open country where Nature, the
great mother, was busy; the butterflies flitted over the soldiers' (p. 262)
graves, the grass grew over unburied dead men, who seemed to be
sinking into the ground, apple trees threw out a wealth of blossom
which the breezes flung broadcast to earth like young lives in the
whirlwind of war. We first came to the place at midnight; in the
morning when we got up we found outside our door, in the midst of a
jumble of broken pump handles and biscuit tins, fragments of chairs,
holy pictures, crucifixes and barbed wire entanglements, a dead dog
dwindling to dust, the hair falling from its skin and the white bones
showing. As we looked on the thing it moved, its belly heaved as if
the animal had gulped in a mouthful of air. We stared aghast and our
laughter was not hearty when a rat scurried out of the carcase and
sought safety in a hole of the adjoining wall. The dog was buried by
the Section 3. Four simple lines serve as its epitaph:--
Here lies a dog as dead as dead,
A Sniper's bullet through its head,
Untroubled now by shots and shells,
It rots and can do nothing else.
The village where I write this is shelled daily, yesterday three men,
two women and two children, all civilians, were killed. The (p.
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