talk and the smell of cooking, the resting-place of the supports who were to be ready that night to move up through the valley and sweep past a victorious front-line brigade into an enemy village two miles away.
All around the wood lay guns which barked occasionally; in front of it was the shell-torn “valley of death,” with its grim windings—“dead man’s corner” and “suicide corner”—up which all troops had to go and on which the German barrage was regularly laid twice or three times a day; not a blade of grass was to be seen in the valley, nothing but huge shell-holes and heaped-up earth, seamed with old and new trenches and littered with all the waste products of a battle, dead men’s equipment and rifles, bombs and shell-cases, huge duds, and here and there the wreck of an ambulance or an ammunition-waggon which had been caught by German shells. Now the valley lay in its hideous squalor basking in the sun, while overhead droned an aeroplane—British it must be, of course. A whistle sounded, and the men in the wood, who lay lazily watching the ’plane, looked round suddenly in alarm. It was a Bosche, was it? Well, wasn’t that the limit? Most of them were young drafts and didn’t understand, but the old hands enlightened them. The Bosche might spot them in that thinned wood, and if it did—well, they wouldn’t do any harm if they
