La Sucrerie, Colincamps, Somme
Wind in the Sweet Chestnuts beside La Sucrerie CWGC Cemetery, Colincamps, October 2015
'In the distance a star-shell would rise, and as its light dilated, wavered and failed, one saw against it the shattered trunks and boughs of trees, lunatic arms uplifted in imprecation, and as though petrified in a moment of shrieking agony. The communication-trench was deep, and one looked up out of it to a now tranquil sky, against which the same stark boughs were partly visible. Then on the right appeared the ruins of a shattered farm, an empty corpse of a building. There was for Bourne an inexplicable fascination in that melancholy landscape: it was so still, so peaceful, and so extraordinarily tense. One heard a shell travel overhead, or the distant rattle of a machine-gun, but these were merely interruptions of a silence which seemed to touch the heart with a finger of ice. It was only really broken when a man, stumbling on a defective or slippery duck-board, uttered under his breath a monosyllabic curse...
"Fuck..." '
The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916, Frederic Manning
"Fuck..." '
The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916, Frederic Manning
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