In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with objects lying amid the litter, he had left “booby traps” to blow our men to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. I little knew when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in another week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and ashes. Only a few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-tricks. Our engineers found most of them before they were touched off, but one went down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of imminent danger. All through the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling of an evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose bodies had gone away. It exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts and in the ruins they had made.