Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/171

 whole surrounding country, left uncultivated, was covered by veritable jungles of weeds and flowers of many colours. We came across the old lines of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. Shell-holes and little wooden crosses were alongside the roads, marking the places where the combats had been most fierce.

In this undulating country, with little vegetation, it is easy to take in at one glance the whole former organization of the land for several kilometres round. On that bare soil, where the zigzag of the trenches and of the lines of barbed-wire entanglements are the traces left of the gigantic battles that had taken place there, it did not need a very great effort of imagination, thanks to the shell-holes which revealed the artillery preparations and the individual pits dotted here and there that showed the progress of the attacking troops, to bring to our minds the often terrible battles that have marked the flux and the reflux of the enemy forces during three years.

A particularly tragic impression was awaiting us some kilometres north of