I walked to the suburb of Blangy by way of St. -Nicolas and came to a sinister place. Along the highroad from Arras to Douai was a great factory of some kind⁠—probably for beet sugar⁠—and then a street of small houses with back yards and gardens much like those in our own suburbs. Holes had been knocked through the walls of the factory and houses, the gardens had been barricaded with barbed wire and sandbags, and the passage from house to house and between the overturned boilers of the factory formed a communication trench to the advanced outpost in the last house held by the French, on the other side of which is the enemy. As we made our way through these ruined houses we had to walk very quietly and to speak in whispers. In the last house of all, which was a combination of fort and dugout, absolute silence was necessary, for there were German soldiers only ten yards away, with trench-mortars and bombs and rifles always ready to snipe across the walls. Through a chink no wider than my finger I could see the redbrick ruins of the houses inhabited by the enemy and the road to Douai⁠ ⁠… The road to Douai as seen through this chink was a tangle of broken bricks.