legs and swung it above his head, in the old Berserker style, and laid
out Germans like ninepins. . . The fellows in the basement
surrendered."




VI


The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin,
and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or
the marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon
piles of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner
officer took us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had
their battery nearby. We stumbled over broken walls and pushed through
undergrowth to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and
wire frames with immortelles remained as relics of that garden where
the people of Vermelles had laid their dead to rest. New dead had
followed old dead. I stumbled over something soft, like a ball of
clay, and saw that it was the head of a faceless man, in a battered
kepi. From a ditch close by came a sickly stench of half-buried flesh.

"The whole place is a pest-house," said the gunner.

Another voice spoke from some hiding-place.

"Salvo!"

The earth shook and there was a flash of red flame, and a shock of