They did not seem very much afraid. They had a kind of
patient misery in their look. Along the road came some more German
prisoners, marching rapidly between mounted guards. Many of them
were wounded, and all of them had a wild, famished, terror-stricken
look. I caught the savage glare of their eyes as they stared into my
car. There was something beast-like and terrible in their gaze like that
of hunted animals caught in a trap.
At a turn in the road the battle lay before us, and we were in the zone
of fire. Away across the fields was a line of villages, with the town of
Dixmude a little to the right of us, perhaps two kilometres away. From
each little town smoke was rising in separate columns, which met at
the top in a great pall of smoke, as a heavy black cloud cresting
above the light on the horizon line. At every moment this blackness
was brightened by puffs of electric blue, extraordinarily vivid, as shells
burst in the air. Then the colour gradually faded out, and the smoke
darkened and became part of the pall. From the mass of houses in
each town came jabs of flame, following the explosions which
sounded with terrific, thudding shocks.
Upon a line of fifteen kilometres there was an incessant cannonade
and in every town there was a hell.
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