The Fox . . .

My intention is not to shock anyone here, but life is not always as beautiful in an aesthetic sense as it might be imagined, and sometimes one finds oneself face to face with unexpected tragedies. One morning a few weeks back in February with my wife we set out to find an organic farm to the north of Compiegne that sells flour in bulk quantities, to supply my wife's bread-making needs. While my wife was in the farm shop, I was out looking around, and asked a farm worker if they were still finding objects from World War One, as I knew the area where we were was well within the vast region of battlefields in northern France from that conflict. He told me sure, they were still finding all sorts of things, like this unexploded artillery shell that had surfaced a few days previously. . . potentially still dangerous . . .
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After we finished our business at the farm we were going out the access road along a stretch of woods when my wife asked me to stop so she could respond to nature's call in the woods there. I went to look around, and very quickly realized from the pockmarked earth with deep holes and traces of trenches all over that we were indeed in the midst of an old battlefield that had been heavily shelled. And walking around trying to get a sense of what had happened there, I literally stumbled on a dead red fox in the woods there. I have no idea what might have caused the death of the once beautfully fur clad animal, but it immediately brought to mind DH Lawrence's short story : "The Fox", which takes place just after World War One. I was wondering how many animals perished in that brutal conflict from the explosions of artillery shells like the one we had just seen back at the farm. . .
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