Only this morning, as we passed that same house, there was the low whine of a shell, and a metallic bang like the sound of a dented kerosene tin when you try to straighten the bend in it.  Then another and another and another.  We could see the white smoke of the shells floating past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few fields away.  It drifted slowly through the trees and then came another salvo.  There were some red roofs near—­those of a neighbouring farm—­but we could not see whether they were firing at them, or at some sign of moving troops, or at a working party if there were any; and I do not know now.  As we came back that way in the afternoon there was more shelling farther along.  The woman in the doorway simply turned her head in its direction for a moment, and so did a younger woman who came to the doorway behind her.  Then they turned to the baby again.

Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages farther on had mostly been battered and broken.  There was a road running at a little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been shattered.  There was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups of buildings there, all shattered, burnt and gaping, like the tangled nightmare of desolation on the morning after a great city fire.  Farther still was open country again, where long communication trenches began to run through the fields—­but you could see none of this from where we stood.  Only in the distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have noticed, if we had looked for it, an occasional broken tree trunk—­snapped off short or broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire.

Those distant trees would be growing over our firing line—­or the German.

It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of its waterlogged ditches and the rain which had fallen miserably almost every day since we arrived.  There is green grass up to within a few yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles.  Here you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which on a fine day fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away from the lines.  The country is flat and you see no sign of the enemy’s trenches, or your own—­the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as completely as if they did not exist.

[Illustration:  “An occasional broken tree-trunk—­snapped off short, or broken down at A sharp angle, by shell fire”]

[Illustration:  No man’s land The barrier which stretches from Belgium to the Swiss border and which not the millions of Rockefeller could enable him to cross]