Birds are singing, crickets are
thridding in the grass and the air is full of the minute clamouring,
murmuring and infinitesimal shouting of little living things. Cool,
mysterious shadows are cast like intricate black lace upon the
roadway, light is reflected from the cobbles in the open spaces, and
on, on, ever so far on, the white road runs straight as an arrow into
the land of mystery, the Unknown.
In front is the fighting line, where trench after trench, wayward (p. 301)
as rivers, wind discreetly through meadow and village. By day you can
mark it by whirling lyddite fumes rising from the ground, and puffs of
smoke curling in the air; at night it is a flare of star-shells and
lurid flamed explosions colouring the sky line with the lights of
death.
Under the moon and stars, the line of battle, seen from a distance, is
a red horizon, ominous and threatening, fringing a land of broken
homes, ruined villages, and blazing funeral pyres. There the mirth of
yesteryear lives only in a soldier's dreams, and the harvest of last
autumn rots with withering men on the field of death and decay.
Nature is busy through it all, the grasses grow green over the dead,
and poppies fringe the parapets where the bayonets glisten, the
skylarks sing their songs at dawn between the lines, the frogs chuckle
in the ponds at dusk, the grasshoppers chirrup in the dells where the
wild iris, jewel-starred, bends mournfully to the breezes of night.
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