Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FESTUBERT THE CHURCHYARD "What age! What shattered earth! What blinded eyes Of Heaven, as at a sight too sick to endure I What more hath heart to hope, hath soul to lure! Here Desolation in his kingdom dies. Here men have wept, here prayed, here made surmise Of God, and lo! their bones lie naked, pure, In ghastly resurrection premature, 'Neath yonder Christus pleading at the skies. But Nature, equal-hearted to her kind— How sways she here? Look where yon shell-hole deep Has made a grave for graves—you there shall find The twisted rose in bloom, blue larkspur peep, Pale evening-primrose and convolvulus— In token of indifference to us." WHEN at a remote point of time we shall look back at the 1915 front, some of us will think of Ypres with its bath-rooms exposed to view on first floors, some of the chocolate truffles to be bought in Armentieres, some of the quarries and prairie of the field of Loos, and some perhaps of Ploegsteert woods with its graves and primroses. But for myself I shall think first of harvest time at Festubert. Ypres was feared and hated, its spirit was wholly evil. It was whispered that sentries on silent nights had gone mad, listening to the slow dropping of bricks in the deserted streets. The spirit of Armentieres was conciliatory. Shells visited it respectfully, avoided cake shops and left the active brewery in peace. But Festubert was neither tragic nor burlesque. I recall its whole nature as operatic. Scenes, actors, costumes and situations were less in themselves than the score to which they were set; to the movement of the summer breeze through the willows, the bumming of aeroplanes, the pizzicato of bullets, the chattering of swallows under deserted eaves, to the rich atmosphere of the land in harvest weather. The day se...