On the ground floor was a large living-room with a big-bodied stove
in the centre of the floor, religious pictures hung on the wall, (p. 268)
a grandfather's clock stood in the niche near the door, the blinds
were drawn across the shattered windows, and several chairs were
placed round a big table near the stove. Upstairs in the bedrooms the
beds were made and in one apartment a large perambulator, with a doll
flung carelessly on its coverlet, stood near the wall, the paper of
which was designed in little circles and in each circle were figures
of little boys and girls, hundreds of them, frivolous mites, absurd
and gay.
Another stair led up to the garret, a gloomy place bare under the red
tiles, some of which were broken. Looking out through the aperture in
the roof I could see the British and German trenches drawn as if in
chalk on a slate of green by an erratic hand, the hand of an idle
child. Behind the German trenches stood the red brick village of ----,
with an impudent chimney standing smokeless in the air, and a burning
mine that vomited clouds of thick black smoke over meadow-fields
splashed with poppies. Shells were bursting everywhere over the grass
and the white lines; the greenish grey fumes of lyddite, the white
smoke of shrapnel rose into mid-air, curled away and died. On the left
of the village a road ran back into the enemy's land, and from (p. 269)
it a cloud of dust was rising over the tree-tops; no doubt vehicles of
war which I could not see were moving about in that direction.
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