-Christ, this side of Péronne, where dead bodies floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges and barges, and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was a highway into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving barges the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter’s yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on stretchers into the wooden sheds. They were the bad cases⁠—French boys wounded in the abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or hopelessly shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, even on the stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful anguish, or moaned like wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds spoiled the music of the lapping water and the whispering of the willows and the song of birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that vision of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched them from the bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried to the bank. I think some of them looked for their own men. One of them spoke to me one day.