midday
Then this was a lull ! -- this cannonading , that to Jeb seemed reaching from skyline to skyline , was only a lull ! Merciful God , he cried in his soul , what might a battle be like ! By midday , after hours of frightful tugging , they were halfway on their journey , being well out on what two weeks ago was the battle field , but now presenting a picture of broadcast desolation . Shell craters , caused by heavier projectiles burrowing and bursting , pockmarked the ground like a telescopic photograph of the moon . Fields , so lately rich with waving grain , were blasted into subsidences and cavities , bisected by crumbled trenches before which the wreckage of barbed-wire entanglements -- a fortnight since forming barriers so impregnable as to resemble from a distance walls of red rust -- lay snarled and tied into a million knots by the ruthless lyddite fingers . It was a pastoral landscape distorted by the paralysis of suffering and death , and Jeb realized that not for many years would these tortured fields regain their tranquillity .