, there were long queues of wounded men taking their turn to the surgeons who were working in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted roof. One day there were three thousand of them, silent, patient, muddy, bloodstained. Blind boys or men with smashed faces swathed in bloody rags groped forward to the dark passage leading to the vault, led by comrades. On the grass outside lay men with leg wounds and stomach wounds. The way past the station to the Arras⁠–⁠Cambrai road was a deathtrap for our transport and I saw the bodies of horses and men horribly mangled there. Dead horses were thick on each side of an avenue of trees on the southern side of the city, lying in their blood and bowels. The traffic policeman on “point duty” on the Arras⁠–⁠Cambrai road had an impassive face under his steel helmet, as though in Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a little at the scream of a shell which plunged through the gable of a corner house above him. There was a Pioneer battalion along the road out to Observatory Ridge, which was a German target. They were mending the road beyond the last trench, through which our men had smashed their way. They were busy with bricks and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells plowing holes in the fields on each side of them.