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Title: The Old Front Line

Author: John Masefield

Release date: February 18, 2007 [eBook #20616]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by K Nordquist, David Edwards, Jeannie Howse and
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Produced by K Nordquist, David Edwards, Jeannie Howse and
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                             THE

                        OLD FRONT LINE

                              BY

                        JOHN MASEFIELD

                 Author of "Gallipoli," etc.

                           New York

                    THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

                             1918

                    _All rights reserved_




                       COPYRIGHT, 1917

                      By JOHN MASEFIELD

     Set up and electrotyped. Published, December, 1917.
                   Reprinted January, 1918.




                              TO

                        NEVILLE LYTTON




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                      FACING
                                                        PAGE

The Road up the Ancre Valley                              16

Artillery Transport in Bapaume Road                       28

Troops Moving to the Front                                38

An Artillery Team                                         40

View in Hamel                                             42

The Ancre River                                           44

The Ancre Opposite Hamel                                  48

The Leipzig Salient                                       58

Dugouts in La Boisselle                                   66

La Boisselle                                              70

Fricourt                                                  74

Fricourt                                                  76

Sandbags at Fricourt                                      78

Mametz                                                    82

Sleighs for the Wounded                                   88

The Attack on La Boisselle                                94




THE OLD FRONT LINE


This description of the old front line, as it was when the Battle of
the Somme began, may some day be of use. All wars end; even this war
will some day end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of
death will grow food, and all this frontier of trouble will be
forgotten. When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone
over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer
with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and
then these places, from which the driving back of the enemy began,
will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps. It is said that even now
in some places the wire has been removed, the explosive salved, the
trenches filled, and the ground ploughed with tractors. In a few
years' time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking
for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench,
Munster Alley, and these other paths to glory will be deep under the
corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.

It is hoped that this description of the line will be followed by an
account of our people's share in the battle. The old front line was
the base from which the battle proceeded. It was the starting-place.
The thing began there. It was the biggest battle in which our people
were ever engaged, and so far it has led to bigger results than any
battle of this war since the Battle of the Marne. It caused a great
falling back of the enemy armies. It freed a great tract of France,
seventy miles long, by from ten to twenty-five miles broad. It first
gave the enemy the knowledge that he was beaten.

Very many of our people never lived to know the result of even the
first day's fighting. For then the old front line was the battlefield,
and the No Man's Land the prize of the battle. They never heard the
cheer of victory nor looked into an enemy trench. Some among them
never even saw the No Man's Land, but died in the summer morning from
some shell in the trench in the old front line here described.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is a difficult thing to describe without monotony, for it varies so
little. It is like describing the course of the Thames from Oxford to
Reading, or of the Severn from Deerhurst to Lydney, or of the Hudson
from New York to Tarrytown. Whatever country the rivers pass they
remain water, bordered by shore. So our front-line trenches, wherever
they lie, are only gashes in the earth, fenced by wire, beside a
greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell-holes, which is fenced
with thicker, blacker, but more tumbled wire on the other side. Behind
this further wire is the parapet of the enemy front-line trench, which
swerves to take in a hillock or to flank a dip, or to crown a slope,
but remains roughly parallel with ours, from seventy to five hundred
yards from it, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale. All the
advantages of position and observation were in the enemy's hands, not
in ours. They took up their lines when they were strong and our side
weak, and in no place in all the old Somme position is our line better
sited than theirs, though in one or two places the sites are nearly
equal. Almost in every part of this old front our men had to go up
hill to attack.

If the description of this old line be dull to read, it should be
remembered that it was dull to hold. The enemy had the lookout posts,
with the fine views over France, and the sense of domination. Our men
were down below with no view of anything but of stronghold after
stronghold, just up above, being made stronger daily. And if the
enemy had strength of position he had also strength of equipment, of
men, of guns, and explosives of all kinds. He had all the advantages
for nearly two years of war, and in all that time our old front line,
whether held by the French or by ourselves, was nothing but a post to
be endured, day in day out, in all weathers and under all fires, in
doubt, difficulty, and danger, with bluff and makeshift and
improvisation, till the tide could be turned. If it be dull to read
about and to see, it was, at least, the old line which kept back the
tide and stood the siege. It was the line from which, after all those
months of war, the tide turned and the besieged became the attackers.

       *       *       *       *       *

To most of the British soldiers who took part in the Battle of the
Somme, the town of Albert must be a central point in a reckoning of
distances. It lies, roughly speaking, behind the middle of the line of
that battle. It is a knot of roads, so that supports and supplies
could and did move from it to all parts of the line during the battle.
It is on the main road, and on the direct railway line from Amiens. It
is by much the most important town within an easy march of the
battlefield. It will be, quite certainly, the centre from which, in
time to come, travellers will start to see the battlefield where such
deeds were done by men of our race.

It is not now (after three years of war and many bombardments) an
attractive town; probably it never was. It is a small straggling town
built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at a point where the
swift chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so
channeled that it can be used for power. Before the war it contained a
few small factories, including one for the making of sewing-machines.
Its most important building was a big church built a few years ago,
through the energy of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert,
a small, probably not very old image, about which strange stories are
told. Before the war it was thought that this church would become a
northern rival to Lourdes for the working of miraculous cures during
the September pilgrimage. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child
stood on an iron stalk on the summit of the church tower. During a
bombardment of the town at a little after three o'clock in the
afternoon of Friday, January 15, 1915, a shell so bent the stalk that
the statue bent down over the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of
our soldiers will remember Albert for anything except this diving
Virgin. Perhaps half of the men engaged in the Battle of the Somme
passed underneath her as they marched up to the line, and, glancing
up, hoped that she might not come down till they were past. From some
one, French or English, a word has gone about that when she does fall
the war will end. Others have said that French engineers have so fixed
her with wire ropes that she cannot fall.

       *       *       *       *       *

From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield of the Somme:

1. In a north-westerly direction to Auchonvillers and Hébuterne.

2. In a northerly direction to Authuille and Hamel.

3. In a north-easterly direction to Pozières.

4. In an easterly direction to Fricourt and Maricourt.

Between the second and the third of these the little river Ancre runs
down its broad, flat, well-wooded valley, much of which is a marsh
through which the river (and man) have forced more than one channel.
This river, which is a swift, clear, chalk stream, sometimes too deep
and swift to ford, cuts the English sector of the battlefield into two
nearly equal portions.

Following the first of the four roads, one passes the wooded village
of Martinsart, to the village of Auchonvillers, which lies among a
clump of trees upon a ridge or plateau top. The road dips here, but
soon rises again, and so, by a flat tableland, to the large village of
Hébuterne. Most of this road, with the exception of one little stretch
near Auchonvillers, is hidden by high ground from every part of the
battlefield. Men moving upon it cannot see the field.

Hébuterne, although close to the line and shelled daily and nightly
for more than two years, was never the object of an attack in force,
so that much of it remains. Many of its walls and parts of some of its
roofs still stand, the church tower is in fair order, and no one
walking in the streets can doubt that he is in a village. Before the
war it was a prosperous village; then, for more than two years, it
rang with the roar of battle and with the business of an army.
Presently the tide of the war ebbed away from it and left it deserted,
so that one may walk in it now, from end to end, without seeing a
human being. It is as though the place had been smitten by the plague.
Villages during the Black Death must have looked thus. One walks in
the village expecting at every turn to meet a survivor, but there is
none; the village is dead; the grass is growing in the street; the
bells are silent; the beasts are gone from the byre and the ghosts
from the church. Stealing about among the ruins and the gardens are
the cats of the village, who have eaten too much man to fear him, but
are now too wild to come to him. They creep about and eye him from
cover and look like evil spirits.

The second of the four roads passes out of Albert, crosses the railway
at a sharp turn, over a bridge called Marmont Bridge, and runs
northward along the valley of the Ancre within sight of the railway.
Just beyond the Marmont Bridge there is a sort of lake or reservoir or
catchment of the Ancre overflows, a little to the right of the road.
By looking across this lake as he walks northward, the traveller can
see some rolls of gentle chalk hill, just beyond which the English
front line ran at the beginning of the battle.

A little further on, at the top of a rise, the road passes the village
of Aveluy, where there is a bridge or causeway over the Ancre valley.
Aveluy itself, being within a mile and a half of enemy gun positions
for nearly two years of war, is knocked about, and rather roofless and
windowless. A cross-road leading to the causeway across the valley
once gave the place some little importance.

  [Illustration: The Road up the Ancre Valley through Aveluy Wood]

Not far to the north of Aveluy, the road runs for more than a mile
through the Wood of Aveluy, which is a well-grown plantation of trees
and shrubs. This wood hides the marsh of the river from the traveller.
Tracks from the road lead down to the marsh and across it by military
causeways.

On emerging from the wood, the road runs within hail of the railway,
under a steep and high chalk bank partly copsed with scrub.
Three-quarters of a mile from the wood it passes through the skeleton
of the village of Hamel, which is now a few ruined walls of brick
standing in orchards on a hillside. Just north of this village,
crossing the road, the railway, and the river-valley, is the old
English front line.

The third of the four roads is one of the main roads of France. It is
the state highway, laid on the line of a Roman road, from Albert to
Bapaume. It is by far the most used and the most important of the
roads crossing the battlefield. As it leads directly to Bapaume, which
was one of the prizes of the victory, and points like a sword through
the heart of the enemy positions it will stay in the memories of our
soldiers as the main avenue of the battle.

The road leaves Albert in a street of dingy and rather broken
red-brick houses. After passing a corner crucifix it shakes itself
free of the houses and rises slowly up a ridge of chalk hill about
three hundred feet high. On the left of the road, this ridge, which is
much withered and trodden by troops and horses, is called Usna Hill.
On the right, where the grass is green and the chalk of the old
communication trenches still white and clean, it is called Tara Hill.
Far away on the left, along the line of the Usna Hill, one can see the
Aveluy Wood.

Looking northward from the top of the Usna-Tara Hill to the dip below
it and along the road for a few yards up the opposite slope, one sees
where the old English front line crossed the road at right angles. The
enemy front line faced it at a few yards' distance, just about two
miles from Albert town.

The fourth of the four roads runs for about a mile eastwards from
Albert, and then slopes down into a kind of gully or shallow valley,
through which a brook once ran and now dribbles. The road crosses the
brook-course, and runs parallel with it for a little while to a place
where the ground on the left comes down in a slanting tongue and on
the right rises steeply into a big hill. The ground of the tongue
bears traces of human habitation on it, all much smashed and
discoloured. This is the once pretty village of Fricourt. The hill on
the right front at this point is the Fricourt Salient. The lines run
round the salient and the road cuts across them.

Beyond Fricourt, the road leaves another slanting tongue at some
distance to its left. On this second tongue the village of Mametz once
stood. Near here the road, having now cut across the salient, again
crosses both sets of lines, and begins a long, slow ascent to a ridge
or crest. From this point, for a couple of miles, the road is planted
on each side with well-grown plane-trees, in some of which magpies
have built their nests ever since the war began. At the top of the
rise the road runs along the plateau top (under trees which show more
and more plainly the marks of war) to a village so planted that it
seems to stand in a wood. The village is built of red brick, and is
rather badly broken by enemy shell fire, though some of the houses in
it are still habitable. This is the village of Maricourt. Three or
four hundred yards beyond Maricourt the road reaches the old English
front line, at the eastern extremity of the English sector, as it was
at the beginning of the battle.

These four roads which lead to the centre and the wings of the
battlefield were all, throughout the battle and for the months of war
which preceded it, dangerous by daylight. All could be shelled by the
map, and all, even the first, which was by much the best hidden of the
four, could be seen, in places, from the enemy position. On some of
the trees or tree stumps by the sides of the roads one may still see
the "camouflage" by which these exposed places were screened from the
enemy observers. The four roads were not greatly used in the months of
war which preceded the battle. In those months, the front was too near
to them, and other lines of supply and approach were more direct and
safer. But there was always some traffic upon them of men going into
the line or coming out, of ration parties, munition and water
carriers, and ambulances. On all four roads many men of our race were
killed. All, at some time, or many times, rang and flashed with
explosions. Danger, death, shocking escape and firm resolve, went up
and down those roads daily and nightly. Our men slept and ate and
sweated and dug and died along them after all hardships and in all
weathers. On parts of them, no traffic moved, even at night, so that
the grass grew high upon them. Presently, they will be quiet country
roads again, and tourists will walk at ease, where brave men once ran
and dodged and cursed their luck, when the Battle of the Somme was
raging.

Then, indeed, those roads were used. Then the grass that had grown on
some of them was trodden and crushed under. The trees and banks by the
waysides were used to hide batteries, which roared all day and all
night. At all hours and in all weathers the convoys of horses slipped
and stamped along those roads with more shells for the ever-greedy
cannon. At night, from every part of those roads, one saw a twilight
of summer lightning winking over the high ground from the
never-ceasing flashes of guns and shells. Then there was no quiet, but
a roaring, a crashing, and a screaming from guns, from shells bursting
and from shells passing in the air. Then, too, on the two roads to the
east of the Ancre River, the troops for the battle moved up to the
line. The battalions were played by their bands through Albert, and up
the slope of Usna Hill to Pozières and beyond, or past Fricourt and
the wreck of Mametz to Montauban and the bloody woodland near it.
Those roads then were indeed paths of glory leading to the grave.

During the months which preceded the Battle of the Somme, other roads
behind our front lines were more used than these. Little villages, out
of shell fire, some miles from the lines, were then of more use to us
than Albert. Long after we are gone, perhaps, stray English tourists,
wandering in Picardy, will see names scratched in a barn, some mark or
notice on a door, some sign-post, some little line of graves, or hear,
on the lips of a native, some slang phrase of English, learned long
before in the wartime, in childhood, when the English were there. All
the villages behind our front were thronged with our people. There
they rested after being in the line and there they established their
hospitals and magazines. It may be said, that men of our race died in
our cause in every village within five miles of the front. Wherever
the traveller comes upon a little company of our graves, he will know
that he is near the site of some old hospital or clearing station,
where our men were brought in from the line.

       *       *       *       *       *

So much for the roads by which our men marched to this battlefield.
Near the lines they had to leave the roads for the shelter of some
communication trench or deep cut in the mud, revetted at the sides
with wire to hinder it from collapsing inwards. By these deep narrow
roads, only broad enough for marching in single file, our men passed
to "the front," to the line itself. Here and there, in recesses in the
trench, under roofs of corrugated iron covered with sandbags, they
passed the offices and the stores of war, telephonists, battalion
headquarters, dumps of bombs, barbed wire, rockets, lights,
machine-gun ammunition, tins, jars, and cases. Many men, passing these
things as they went "in" for the first time, felt with a sinking of
the heart, that they were leaving all ordered and arranged things,
perhaps forever, and that the men in charge of these stores enjoyed,
by comparison, a life like a life at home.

Much of the relief and munitioning of the fighting lines was done at
night. Men going into the lines saw little of where they were going.
They entered the gash of the communication trench, following the load
on the back of the man in front, but seeing perhaps nothing but the
shape in front, the black walls of the trench, and now and then some
gleam of a star in the water under foot. Sometimes as they marched
they would see the starshells, going up and bursting like rockets, and
coming down With a wavering slow settling motion, as white and bright
as burning magnesium wire, shedding a kind of dust of light upon the
trench and making the blackness intense when they went out. These
lights, the glimmer in the sky from the enemy's guns, and now and then
the flash of a shell, were the things seen by most of our men on their
first going in.

In the fire trench they saw little more than the parapet. If work were
being done in the No Man's Land, they still saw little save by these
lights that floated and fell from the enemy and from ourselves. They
could see only an array of stakes tangled with wire, and something
distant and dark which might be similar stakes, or bushes, or men, in
front of what could only be the enemy line. When the night passed, and
those working outside the trench had to take shelter, they could see
nothing, even at a loophole or periscope, but the greenish strip of
ground, pitted with shell-holes and fenced with wire, running up to
the enemy line. There was little else for them to see, looking to the
front, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale.

The soldiers who held this old front line of ours saw this grass and
wire day after day, perhaps, for many months. It was the limit of
their world, the horizon of their landscape, the boundary. What
interest there was in their life was the speculation, what lay beyond
that wire, and what the enemy was doing there. They seldom saw an
enemy. They heard his songs and they were stricken by his missiles,
but seldom saw more than, perhaps, a swiftly moving cap at a gap in
the broken parapet, or a grey figure flitting from the light of a
starshell. Aeroplanes brought back photographs of those unseen lines.
Sometimes, in raids in the night, our men visited them and brought
back prisoners; but they remained mysteries and unknown.

In the early morning of the 1st of July, 1916, our men looked at them
as they showed among the bursts of our shells. Those familiar heaps,
the lines, were then in a smoke of dust full of flying clods and
shards and gleams of fire. Our men felt that now, in a few minutes,
they would see the enemy and know what lay beyond those parapets and
probe the heart of that mystery. So, for the last half-hour, they
watched and held themselves ready, while the screaming of the shells
grew wilder and the roar of the bursts quickened into a drumming. Then
as the time drew near, they looked a last look at that unknown
country, now almost blotted in the fog of War, and saw the flash of
our shells, breaking a little further off as the gunners "lifted," and
knew that the moment had come. Then for one wild confused moment they
knew that they were running towards that unknown land, which they
could still see in the dust ahead. For a moment, they saw the parapet
with the wire in front of it, and began, as they ran, to pick out in
their minds a path through that wire. Then, too often, to many of
them, the grass that they were crossing flew up in shards and sods and
gleams of fire from the enemy shells, and those runners never reached
the wire, but saw, perhaps, a flash, and the earth rushing nearer, and
grasses against the sky, and then saw nothing more at all, for ever
and for ever and for ever.

       *       *       *       *       *

It may be some years before those whose fathers, husbands and brothers
were killed in this great battle, may be able to visit the battlefield
where their dead are buried. Perhaps many of them, from brooding on
the map, and from dreams and visions in the night, have in their minds
an image or picture of that place. The following pages may help some
few others, who have not already formed that image, to see the scene
as it appears to-day. What it was like on the day of battle cannot be
imagined by those who were not there.

It was a day of an intense blue summer beauty, full of roaring,
violence, and confusion of death, agony, and triumph, from dawn till
dark. All through that day, little rushes of the men of our race went
towards that No Man's Land from the bloody shelter of our trenches.
Some hardly left our trenches, many never crossed the green space,
many died in the enemy wire, many had to fall back. Others won across
and went further, and drove the enemy from his fort, and then back
from line to line and from one hasty trenching to another, till the
Battle of the Somme ended in the falling back of the enemy army.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those of our men who were in the line at Hébuterne, at the extreme
northern end of the battlefield of the Somme, were opposite the enemy
salient of Gommecourt. This was one of those projecting fortresses or
flankers, like the Leipzig, Ovillers, and Fricourt, with which the
enemy studded and strengthened his front line. It is doubtful if any
point in the line in France was stronger than this point of
Gommecourt. Those who visit it in future times may be surprised that
such a place was so strong.

All the country there is gentler and less decided than in the southern
parts of the battlefield. Hébuterne stands on a plateau-top; to the
east of it there is a gentle dip down to a shallow hollow or valley;
to the east of this again there is a gentle rise to higher ground, on
which the village of Gommecourt stood. The church of Gommecourt is
almost exactly one mile northeast and by north from the church at
Hébuterne; both churches being at the hearts of their villages.

Seen from our front line at Hébuterne, Gommecourt is little more than
a few red-brick buildings, standing in woodland on a rise of ground.
Wood hides the village to the north, the west, and the southwest. A
big spur of woodland, known as Gommecourt Park, thrusts out boldly
from the village towards the plateau on which the English lines stood.
This spur, strongly fortified by the enemy, made the greater part of
the salient in the enemy line. The landscape away from the wood is not
in any way remarkable, except that it is open, and gentle, and on a
generous scale. Looking north from our position at Hébuterne there is
the snout of the woodland salient; looking south there is the green
shallow shelving hollow or valley which made the No Man's Land for
rather more than a mile. It is just such a gentle waterless hollow,
like a dried-up river-bed, as one may see in several places in chalk
country in England, but it is unenclosed land, and therefore more open
and seemingly on a bigger scale than such a landscape would be in
England, where most fields are small and fenced. Our old front line
runs where the ground shelves or glides down into the valley; the
enemy front line runs along the gentle rise up from the valley. The
lines face each other across the slopes. To the south, the slope on
which the enemy line stands is very slight.

  [Illustration: Artillery Transport crossing a Trench Bridge into
  the Bapaume Road]

The impression given by this tract of land once held by the enemy is
one of graceful gentleness. The wood on the little spur, even now, has
something green about it. The village, once almost within the wood,
wrecked to shatters as it is, has still a charm of situation. In the
distance behind Gommecourt there is some ill-defined rising ground
forming gullies and ravines. On these rises are some dark clumps of
woodland, one of them called after the nightingales, which perhaps
sing there this year, in what is left of their home. There is nothing
now to show that this quiet landscape was one of the tragical places
of this war.

The whole field of the Somme is chalk hill and downland, like similar
formations in England. It has about it, in every part of it, certain
features well known to every one who has ever travelled in a chalk
country. These features occur even in the gentle, rolling, and not
strongly marked sector near Hébuterne. Two are very noticeable, the
formation almost everywhere of those steep, regular banks or terraces,
which the French call remblais and our own farmers lynchets, and the
presence, in nearly all parts of the field, of roads sunken between
two such banks into a kind of narrow gully or ravine. It is said, that
these remblais or lynchets, which may be seen in English chalk
countries, as in the Dunstable Downs, in the Chiltern Hills, and in
many parts of Berkshire and Wiltshire, are made in each instance, in a
short time, by the ploughing away from the top and bottom of any
difficult slope. Where two slopes adjoin, such ploughing steepens the
valley between them into a gully, which, being always unsown, makes a
track through the crops when they are up. Sometimes, though less
frequently, the farmer ploughs away from a used track on quite flat
land, and by doing this on both sides of the track, he makes the track
a causeway or ridge-way, slightly raised above the adjoining fields.
This type of raised road or track can be seen in one or two parts of
the battlefield (just above Hamel and near Pozières for instance), but
the hollow or sunken road and the steep remblai or lynchet are
everywhere. One may say that no quarter of a mile of the whole field
is without one or other of them. The sunken roads are sometimes very
deep. Many of our soldiers, on seeing them, have thought that they
were cuttings made, with great labour, through the chalk, and that the
remblais or lynchets were piled up and smoothed for some unknown
purpose by primitive man. Probably it will be found, that in every
case they are natural slopes made sharper by cultivation. Two or three
of these lynchets and sunken roads cross the shallow valley of the No
Man's Land near Hébuterne. By the side of one of them, a line of
Sixteen Poplars, now ruined, made a landmark between the lines.

The line continues (with some slight eastward trendings, but without a
change in its gentle quiet) southwards from this point for about a
mile to a slight jut, or salient in the enemy line. This jut was known
by our men as the Point, and a very spiky point it was to handle. From
near the Point on our side of No Man's Land, a bank or lynchet, topped
along its edge with trees, runs southwards for about a mile. In four
places, the trees about this lynchet grow in clumps or copses, which
our men called after the four Evangelists, John, Luke, Mark, and
Matthew. This bank marks the old English front line between the Point
and the Serre Road a mile to the south of it. Behind this English
line are several small copses, on ground which very gently rises
towards the crest of the plateau a mile to the west. In front of most
of this part of our line, the ground rises towards the enemy trenches,
so that one can see little to the front, but the slope up. The No
Man's Land here is not green, but as full of shell-holes and the ruin
of battle as any piece of the field. Directly between Serre and the
Matthew Copse, where the lines cross a rough lump of ground, the enemy
parapet is whitish from the chalk. The whitish parapet makes the
skyline to observers in the English line. Over that parapet, some
English battalions made one of the most splendid charges of the
battle, in the heroic attack on Serre four hundred yards beyond.

To the right of our front at Matthew Copse the ground slopes southward
a little, past what may once have been a pond or quarry, but is now a
pit in the mud, to the Serre road. Here one can look up the muddy road
to the hamlet of Serre, where the wrecks of some brick buildings stand
in a clump of tree stumps, or half-right down a God-forgotten kind of
glen, blasted by fire to the look of a moor in hell. A few rampikes of
trees standing on one side of this glen give the place its name of Ten
Tree Alley. Immediately to the south of the Serre road, the ground
rises into one of the many big chalk spurs, which thrust from the main
Hébuterne plateau towards the Ancre Valley. The spur at this point
runs east and west, and the lines cross it from north and south. They
go up it side by side, a hundred and fifty yards apart, with a
greenish No Man's Land between them. The No Man's Land, as usual, is
the only part of all this chalk spur that is not burnt, gouged,
pocked, and pitted with shell fire. It is, however, enough marked by
the war to be bad going. When they are well up the spur, the lines
draw nearer, and at the highest point of the spur they converge in one
of the terrible places of the battlefield.

For months before the battle began, it was a question here, which side
should hold the highest point of the spur. Right at the top of the
spur there is one patch of ground, measuring, it may be, two hundred
yards each way, from which one can see a long way in every direction.
From this patch, the ground droops a little towards the English side
and stretches away fairly flat towards the enemy side, but one can see
far either way, and to have this power of seeing, both sides fought
desperately.

Until the beginning of the war, this spur of ground was corn-land,
like most of the battlefield. Unfenced country roads crossed it. It
was a quiet, lonely, prosperous ploughland, stretching for miles, up
and down, in great sweeping rolls and folds, like our own chalk
downlands. It had one feature common to all chalk countries; it was a
land of smooth expanses. Before the war, all this spur was a smooth
expanse, which passed in a sweep from the slope to the plateau, over
this crown of summit.

To-day, the whole of the summit (which is called the Redan Ridge), for
all its two hundred yards, is blown into pits and craters from twenty
to fifty feet deep, and sometimes fifty yards long. These pits and
ponds in rainy weather fill up with water, which pours from one pond
into another, so that the hill-top is loud with the noise of the
brooks. For many weeks, the armies fought for this patch of hill. It
was all mined, counter-mined, and re-mined, and at each explosion the
crater was fought for and lost and won. It cannot be said that either
side won that summit till the enemy was finally beaten from all that
field, for both sides conquered enough to see from. On the enemy side,
a fortification of heaped earth was made; on our side, castles were
built of sandbags filled with flint. These strongholds gave both
sides enough observation. The works face each other across the ponds.
The sandbags of the English works have now rotted, and flag about like
the rags of uniform or like withered grass. The flint and chalk laid
bare by their rotting look like the grey of weathered stone, so that,
at a little distance, the English works look old and noble, as though
they were the foundations of some castle long since fallen under Time.

To the right, that is to the southward, from these English castles
there is a slope of six hundred yards into a valley or gully. The
slope is not in any way remarkable or seems not to be, except that the
ruin of a road, now barely to be distinguished from the field, runs
across it. The opposing lines of trenches go down the slope, much as
usual, with the enemy line above on a slight natural glacis. Behind
this enemy line is the bulk of the spur, which is partly white from
up-blown chalk, partly burnt from months of fire, and partly faintly
green from recovering grass. A little to the right or south, on this
bulk of spur, there are the stumps of trees and no grass at all,
nothing but upturned chalk and burnt earth. On the battlefield of the
Somme, these are the marks of a famous place.

The valley into which the slope descends is a broadish gentle opening
in the chalk hills, with a road running at right angles to the lines
of trenches at the bottom of it. As the road descends, the valley
tightens in, and just where the enemy line crosses it, it becomes a
narrow deep glen or gash, between high and steep banks of chalk. Well
within the enemy position and fully seven hundred yards from our line,
another such glen or gash runs into this glen, at right angles. At
this meeting place of the glens is or was the village of Beaumont
Hamel, which the enemy said could never be taken.

For the moment it need not be described; for it was not seen by many
of our men in the early stages of the battle. In fact our old line was
at least five hundred yards outside it. But all our line in the valley
here was opposed to the village defences, and the fighting at this
point was fierce and terrible, and there are some features in the No
Man's Land just outside the village which must be described. These
features run parallel with our line right down to the road in the
valley, and though they are not features of great tactical importance,
like the patch of summit above, where the craters are, or like the
windmill at Pozières, they were the last things seen by many brave
Irish and Englishmen, and cannot be passed lightly by.

The features are a lane, fifty or sixty yards in front of our front
trench, and a remblai or lynchet fifty or sixty yards in front of the
lane.

The lane is a farmer's track leading from the road in the valley to
the road on the spur. It runs almost north and south, like the lines
of trenches, and is about five hundred yards long. From its start in
the valley-road to a point about two hundred yards up the spur it is
sunken below the level of the field on each side of it. At first the
sinking is slight, but it swiftly deepens as it goes up hill. For more
than a hundred yards it lies between banks twelve or fifteen feet
deep. After this part the banks die down into insignificance, so that
the road is nearly open. The deep part, which is like a very deep,
broad, natural trench, was known to our men as the Sunken Road. The
banks of this sunken part are perpendicular. Until recently, they were
grown over with a scrub of dwarf beech, ash, and sturdy saplings, now
mostly razed by fire. In the road itself our men built up walls of
sandbags to limit the effects of enemy shell fire. From these defences
steps cut in the chalk of the bank lead to the field above, where
there were machine-gun pits.

The field in front of the lane (where these pits were) is a fairly
smooth slope for about fifty yards. Then there is the lynchet or
remblai, like a steep cliff, from three to twelve feet high, hardly to
be noticed from above until the traveller is upon it. Below this
lynchet is a fairly smooth slope, so tilted that it slopes down to the
right towards the valley road, and slopes up to the front towards the
enemy line. Looking straight to the front from the Sunken Road our men
saw no sudden dip down at the lynchet, but a continuous grassy field,
at first flat, then slowly rising towards the enemy parapet. The line
of the lynchet-top merges into the slope behind it, so that it is not
seen. The enemy line thrusts out in a little salient here, so as to
make the most of a little bulge of ground which was once wooded and
still has stumps. The bulge is now a heap and ruin of burnt and
tumbled mud and chalk. To reach it our men had to run across the flat
from the Sunken Road, slide down the bank of the lynchet, and then run
up the glacis to the parapet.

The Sunken Road was only held by our men as an advanced post and
"jumping off" (or attacking) point. Our line lay behind it on a higher
part of the spur, which does not decline gradually into the valley
road, but breaks off in a steep bank cut by our soldiers into a flight
of chalk steps. These steps gave to all this part of the line the
name of Jacob's Ladder. From the top of Jacob's Ladder there is a good
view of the valley road running down into Beaumont Hamel. To the right
there is a big steep knoll of green hill bulking up to the south of
the valley, and very well fenced with enemy wire. All the land to the
right or south of Jacob's Ladder is this big green hill, which is very
steep, irregular, and broken with banks, and so ill-adapted for
trenching that we were forced to make our line further from the enemy
than is usual on the front. The front trenches here are nearly five
hundred yards apart. As far as the hill-top the enemy line has a great
advantage of position. To reach it our men had to cross the open and
ascend a slope which gave neither dead ground nor cover to front or
flank. Low down the hill, running parallel with the road, is a little
lynchet, topped by a few old hawthorn bushes. All this bit of the old
front line was the scene of a most gallant attack by our men on the
1st of July. Those who care may see it in the official cinematograph
films of the Battle of the Somme.

  [Illustration: Troops moving to the Front in the Dust of the
  Summer Fighting]

Right at the top of the hill there is a dark enclosure of wood,
orchard, and plantation, with several fairly well preserved red-brick
buildings in it. This is the plateau-village of Auchonvillers. On the
slopes below it, a couple of hundred yards behind Jacob's Ladder,
there is a little round clump of trees. Both village and clump make
conspicuous landmarks. The clump was once the famous English
machine-gun post of the Bowery, from which our men could shoot down
the valley into Beaumont Hamel.

The English line goes up the big green hill, in trenches and saps of
reddish clay, to the plateau or tableland at the top. Right up on the
top, well behind our front line and close to one of our communication
trenches, there is a good big hawthorn bush, in which a magpie has
built her nest. This bush, which is strangely beautiful in the spring,
has given to the plateau the name of the Hawthorn Ridge.

Just where the opposing lines reach the top of the Ridge they both
bend from their main north and south direction towards the southeast,
and continue in that course for several miles. At the point or salient
of the bending, in the old enemy position, there is a crater of a mine
which the English sprang in the early morning of the 1st of July. This
is the crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was
supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is
not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but
none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is
like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one
hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and
twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish
tetter, like sulphur or the rancid fat on meat. The inside has rather
the look of meat, for it is reddish and all streaked and scabbed with
this pox and with discoloured chalk. A lot of it trickles and oozes
like sores discharging pus, and this liquid gathers in holes near the
bottom, and is greenish and foul and has the look of dead eyes staring
upwards.

  [Illustration: An Artillery Team taking the Bank]

All that can be seen of it from the English line is a disarrangement
of the enemy wire and parapet. It is a hole in the ground which cannot
be seen except from quite close at hand. At first sight, on looking
into it, it is difficult to believe that it was the work of man; it
looks so like nature in her evil mood. It is hard to imagine that only
three years ago that hill was cornfield, and the site of the chasm
grew bread. After that happy time, the enemy bent his line there and
made the salient a stronghold, and dug deep shelters for his men in
the walls of his trenches; the marks of the dugouts are still plain in
the sides of the pit. Then, on the 1st of July, when the explosion
was to be a signal for the attack, and our men waited in the trenches
for the spring, the belly of the chalk was heaved, and chalk, clay,
dugouts, gear, and enemy, went up in a dome of blackness full of
pieces, and spread aloft like a toadstool, and floated, and fell down.

From the top of the Hawthorn Ridge, our soldiers could see a great
expanse of chalk downland, though the falling of the hill kept them
from seeing the enemy's position. That lay on the slope of the ridge,
somewhere behind the wire, quite out of sight from our lines. Looking
out from our front line at this salient, our men saw the enemy wire
almost as a skyline. Beyond this line, the ground dipped towards
Beaumont Hamel (which was quite out of sight in the valley) and rose
again sharply in the steep bulk of Beaucourt spur. Beyond this lonely
spur, the hills ranked and ran, like the masses of a moor, first the
high ground above Miraumont, and beyond that the high ground of the
Loupart Wood, and away to the east the bulk that makes the left bank
of the Ancre River. What trees there are in this moorland were not
then all blasted. Even in Beaumont Hamel some of the trees were green.
The trees in the Ancre River Valley made all that marshy meadow like
a forest. Looking out on all this, the first thought of the soldier
was that here he could really see something of the enemy's ground.

  [Illustration: A View in Hamel]

It is true, that from this hill-top much land, then held by the enemy,
could be seen, but very little that was vital to the enemy could be
observed. His lines of supply and support ran in ravines which we
could not see; his batteries lay beyond crests, his men were in hiding
places. Just below us on the lower slopes of this Hawthorn Ridge he
had one vast hiding place which gave us a great deal of trouble. This
was a gully or ravine, about five hundred yards long, well within his
position, running (roughly speaking) at right angles with his front
line. Probably it was a steep and deep natural fold made steeper and
deeper by years of cultivation. It is from thirty to forty feet deep,
and about as much across at the top; it has abrupt sides, and thrusts
out two forks to its southern side. These forks give it the look of a
letter +Y+ upon the maps, for which reason both the French and
ourselves called the place the "Ravin en Y" or "Y Ravine." Part of the
southernmost fork was slightly open to observation from our lines; the
main bulk of the gully was invisible to us, except from the air.

Whenever the enemy has had a bank of any kind, at all screened from
fire, he has dug into it for shelter. In the Y Ravine, which provided
these great expanses of banks, he dug himself shelters of unusual
strength and size. He sank shafts into the banks, tunnelled long
living rooms, both above and below the gully-bottom, linked the rooms
together with galleries, and cut hatchways and bolting holes to lead
to the surface as well as to the gully. All this work was securely
done, with balks of seasoned wood, iron girders, and concreting. Much
of it was destroyed by shell fire during the battle, but much not hit
by shells is in good condition to-day even after the autumn rains and
the spring thaw. The galleries which lead upwards and outwards from
this underground barracks to the observation posts and machine-gun
emplacements in the open air, are cunningly planned and solidly made.
The posts and emplacements to which they led are now, however, (nearly
all) utterly destroyed by our shell fire.

In this gully barracks, and in similar shelters cut in the chalk of
the steeper banks near Beaumont Hamel, the enemy could hold ready
large numbers of men to repel an attack or to make a counter-attack.
They lived in these dugouts in comparative safety and in moderate
comfort. When our attacks came during the early months of the battle,
they were able to pass rapidly and safely by these underground
galleries from one part of the position to another, bringing their
machine guns with them. However, the Ravine was presently taken and
the galleries and underground shelters were cleared. In one
underground room in that barracks, nearly fifty of the enemy were
found lying dead in their bunks, all unwounded, and as though asleep.
They had been killed by the concussion of the air following on the
burst of a big shell at the entrance.

  [Illustration: The Ancre River]

One other thing may be mentioned about this Hawthorn Ridge. It runs
parallel with the next spur (the Beaucourt spur) immediately to the
north of it, then in the enemy's hands. Just over the crest of this
spur, out of sight from our lines, is a country road, well banked and
screened, leading from Beaucourt to Serre. This road was known by our
men as Artillery Lane, because it was used as a battery position by
the enemy. The wrecks of several of his guns lie in the mud there
still. From the crest in front of this road there is a view to the
westward, so wonderful that those who see it realize at once that the
enemy position on the Ridge, which, at a first glance, seems badly
sited for observation, is, really, well placed. From this crest, the
Ridge-top, all our old front line, and nearly all the No Man's Land
upon it, is exposed, and plainly to be seen. On a reasonably clear
day, no man could leave our old line unseen from this crest. No
artillery officer, correcting the fire of a battery, could ask for a
better place from which to watch the bursts of his shells. This crest,
in front of the lane of enemy guns, made it possible for the enemy
batteries to drop shells upon our front line trenches before all the
men were out of them at the instant of the great attack.

The old English line runs along the Hawthorn Ridge-top for some
hundreds of yards, and then crosses a dip or valley, which is the
broad, fanshaped, southern end of a fork of Y Ravine. A road runs, or
ran, down this dip into the Y Ravine. It is not now recognisable as a
road, but the steep banks at each side of it, and some bluish
metalling in the shell holes, show that one once ran there. These
banks are covered with hawthorn bushes. A remblai, also topped with
hawthorn, lies a little to the north of this road.

From this lynchet, looking down the valley into the Y Ravine, the
enemy position is saddle-shaped, low in the middle, where the Y
Ravine narrows, and rising to right and left to a good height. Chalk
hills from their form often seem higher than they really are,
especially in any kind of haze. Often they have mystery and nearly
always beauty. For some reason, the lumping rolls of chalk hill rising
up on each side of this valley have a menace and a horror about them.
One sees little of the enemy position from the English line. It is now
nothing but a track of black wire in front of some burnt and battered
heapings of the ground, upon which the grass and the flowers have only
now begun to push. At the beginning of the battle it must have been
greener and fresher, for then the fire of hell had not come upon it;
but even then, even in the summer day, that dent in the chalk leading
to the Y Ravine must have seemed a threatening and forbidding place.

Our line goes along the top of the ridge here, at a good distance from
the enemy line. It is dug on the brow of the plateau in reddish earth
on the top of chalk. It is now much as our men left it for the last
time. The trench-ladders by which they left it are still in place in
the bays of the trenches. All the outer, or jumping-off, trenches, are
much destroyed by enemy shell fire, which was very heavy here from
both sides of the Ancre River. A quarter of a mile to the southeast
of the Y Ravine the line comes within sight of the great gap which
cuts the battlefield in two. This gap is the valley of the Ancre
River, which runs here beneath great spurs of chalk, as the Thames
runs at Goring and Pangbourne. On the lonely hill, where this first
comes plainly into view, as one travels south along the line, there
used to be two bodies of English soldiers, buried once, and then
unburied by the rain. They lay in the No Man's Land, outside the
English wire, in what was then one of the loneliest places in the
field. The ruin of war lay all round them.

There are many English graves (marked, then, hurriedly, by the man's
rifle thrust into the ground) in that piece of the line. On a windy
day, these rifles shook in the wind as the bayonets bent to the blast.
The field testaments of both men lay open beside them in the mud. The
rain and the mud together had nearly destroyed the little books, but
in each case it was possible to read one text. In both cases, the text
which remained, read with a strange irony. The one book, beside a
splendid youth, cut off in his promise, was open at a text which ran,
"And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and mighty
in word and in deed." The other book, beside one who had been killed
in an attack which did not succeed at the moment, but which led to the
falling back of the enemy nation from many miles of conquered ground,
read even more strangely. It was open at the eighty-ninth Psalm, and
the only legible words were, "Thou hast broken down all his hedges;
thou hast brought his strong holds to ruin."

  [Illustration: The Ancre opposite Hamel]

From the hill-top where these graves are the lines droop down towards
the second of the four roads, which runs here in the Ancre valley
parallel with the river and the railway. The slope is steep and the
ground broken with shallow gullies and lynchets. Well down towards the
river, just above the road, a flattish piece of land leads to a ravine
with steep and high banks. This flattish land, well within the enemy
line, was the scene of very desperate fighting on the 1st of July.

Looking at the enemy line in front of our own line here, one sees
little but a gentle crest, protected by wire, in front of another
gentle crest, also wired, with other gentle crests beyond and to the
left. To the right there is a blur of gentle crests behind tree-tops.
It is plain from a glance that gullies run irregularly into the spurs
here, and make the defence easy. All through the fighting here, it
happened too often that the taking of one crest only meant that the
winners were taken in flank by machine guns in the crest beyond, and
(in this bit of the line) by other guns on the other side of the
river.

Well to the back of the English line here, on the top of the plateau,
level with Auchonvillers, some trees stand upon the skyline, with the
tower of a church, battered, but not destroyed, like the banner of
some dauntless one, a little to the west of the wood. The wood shows
marks of shelling, but nothing like the marks on the woods attacked by
our own men. There are signs of houses among the trees, and the line
of a big wood to the east of them.

This church and the buildings near it are parts of Mesnil village,
most of which lies out of sight on the further side of the crest. They
are conspicuous landmarks, and can be made out from many parts of the
field. The chalk scarp on which they stand is by much the most
beautiful thing on the battlefield, and the sight of Mesnil church
tower on the top of it is most pleasant. That little banner stood all
through the war, and not all the guns of the enemy could bring it
down. Many men in the field near Mesnil, enduring the mud of the thaw,
and the lice, wet, and squalor of dugouts near the front, were cheered
by that church tower. "For all their bloody talk the bastards
couldn't bring it down."

The hill with the lines upon it slopes steeply down to the valley of
the Ancre. Just where the lines come to the valley, the ground drops
abruptly, in a cliff or steep bank, twenty-five feet high, to the
road.

Our line on this slope covers the village of Hamel, which lies just
behind the line, along the road and on the hill-slopes above it. The
church and churchyard of Hamel, both utterly ruined, lie well up the
hill in such a position that they made good posts from which our
snipers could shoot across the river at men in the Schwaben Redoubt.
Crocuses, snowdrops, and a purple flower once planted on the graves of
the churchyard, but now escaped into the field, blossomed here in this
wintry spring, long before any other plant on the battlefield was in
bud.

Hamel in peace time may have contained forty houses, some shatters of
which still stand. There are a few red-brick walls, some frames of
wood from which the plaster has been blown, some gardens gone wild,
fruit trees unpruned and more or less ragged from fire, and an air of
desecration and desertion. In some of the ruins there are signs of
use. The lower windows are filled with sandbags, the lower stories
are strengthened with girders and baulks. From the main road in the
valley, a country track or road, muddy even for the Somme, leads up
the hill, through the heart of the village, past the church, towards
our old line and Auchonvillers.

Not much can be seen from the valley road in Hamel, for it is only a
few feet above the level of the river-bed, which is well grown with
timber not yet completely destroyed. The general view to the eastward
from this low-lying road is that of a lake, five hundred yards across,
in some wild land not yet settled. The lake is shallow, blind with
reeds, vivid with water-grass, and lively with moor-fowl. The trees
grow out of the water, or lie in it, just as they fell when they were
shot. On the whole, the trees just here, though chipped and knocked
about, have not suffered badly; they have the look of trees, and are
leafy in summer. Beyond the trees, on the other side of the marsh, is
the steep and high eastern bank of the Ancre, on which a battered
wood, called Thiepval Wood, stands like an army of black and haggard
rampikes. But for this stricken wood, the eastern bank of the Ancre is
a gentle, sloping hill, bare of trees. On the top of this hill is the
famous Schwaben Redoubt.

The Ancre River and the marshy valley through which it runs are
crossed by several causeways. One most famous causeway crosses just in
front of Hamel on the line of the old Mill Road. The Mill from which
it takes its name lies to the left of the causeway on a sort of green
island. The wheel, which is not destroyed, still shows among the
ruins. The enemy had a dressing station there at one time.

The marshy valley of the Ancre splits up the river here into several
channels besides the mill stream. The channels are swift and deep,
full of exquisitely clear water just out of the chalk. The marsh is
rather blind with snags cut off by shells. For some years past the
moor-fowl in the marsh have been little molested. They are very
numerous here; their cries make the place lonely and romantic.

When one stands on this causeway over the Ancre one is almost at the
middle point of the battlefield, for the river cuts the field in two.
Roughly speaking, the ground to the west of the river was the scene of
containing fighting, the ground to the east of the river the scene of
our advance. At the eastern end of the causeway the Old Mill Road
rises towards the Schwaben Redoubt.

       *       *       *       *       *

All the way up the hill the road is steep, rather deep and bad. It is
worn into the chalk and shows up very white in sunny weather. Before
the battle it lay about midway between the lines, but it was always
patrolled at night by our men. The ground on both sides of it is
almost more killed and awful than anywhere in the field. On the
English or south side of it, distant from one hundred to two hundred
yards, is the shattered wood, burnt, dead, and desolate. On the enemy
side, at about the same distance, is the usual black enemy wire, much
tossed and bunched by our shells, covering a tossed and tumbled chalky
and filthy parapet. Our own old line is an array of rotted sandbags,
filled with chalkflint, covering the burnt wood. One need only look at
the ground to know that the fighting here was very grim, and to the
death. Near the road and up the slope to the enemy the ground is
littered with relics of our charges, mouldy packs, old shattered
scabbards, rifles, bayonets, helmets curled, torn, rolled, and
starred, clips of cartridges, and very many graves. Many of the
graves are marked with strips of wood torn from packing cases, with
pencilled inscriptions, "An unknown British Hero"; "In loving memory
of Pte. ----"; "Two unknown British heroes"; "An unknown British
soldier"; "A dead Fritz." That gentle slope to the Schwaben is covered
with such things.

Passing these things, by some lane through the wire and clambering
over the heaps of earth which were once the parapet, one enters the
Schwaben, where so much life was spent. As in so many places on this
old battlefield, the first thought is: "Why, they were in an eyrie
here; our fellows had no chance at all." There is no wonder, then,
that the approach is strewn with graves. The line stands at the top of
a smooth, open slope, commanding our old position and the Ancre
Valley. There is no cover of any kind upon the slope except the rims
of the shell-holes, which make rings of mud among the grass. Just
outside the highest point of the front line there is a little clump of
our graves. Just inside there is a still unshattered concrete fortlet,
built for the machine gun by which those men were killed.

All along that front trench of the Schwaben, lying on the parapet,
half buried in the mud, are the belts of machine guns, still full of
cartridges. There were many machine guns on that earthen wall last
year. When our men scrambled over the tumbled chalky line of old
sandbags, so plain just down the hill, and came into view on the
slope, running and stumbling in the hour of the attack, the machine
gunners in the fortress felt indeed that they were in an eyrie, and
that our fellows had no chance at all.

For the moment one thinks this, as the enemy gunners must have thought
it; then, looking up the hill at the inner works of the great fort,
the thought comes that it was not so happy a fate to have to hold this
eyrie. Sometimes, in winter storms, the Atlantic is heaved aloft and
tossed and tumbled under an evil heaven till all its wilderness is
hideous. This hill-top is exactly as though some such welter of water
had suddenly become mud. It is all heaped and tossed and tumbled as
though the earth there had been a cross-sea. In one place some great
earth wave of a trench has been bitten into and beaten back and turned
blind into an eddy by great pits and chasms and running heaps. Then in
another place, where the crown of the work once reared itself aloft
over the hill, the heaps of mud are all blurred and pounded together,
so that there is no design, no trace, no visible plan of any
fortress, only a mess of mud bedevilled and bewildered. All this mess
of heaps and hillocks is strung and filthied over with broken bodies
and ruined gear. There is nothing whole, nor alive, nor clean, in all
its extent; it is a place of ruin and death, blown and blasted out of
any likeness to any work of man, and so smashed that there is no
shelter on it, save for the one machine gunner in his box. On all that
desolate hill our fire fell like rain for days and nights and weeks,
till the watchers in our line could see no hill at all, but a great,
vague, wreathing devil of darkness in which little sudden fires winked
and glimmered and disappeared.

Once in a lull of the firing a woman appeared upon the enemy parapet
and started to walk along it. Our men held their fire and watched her.
She walked steadily along the whole front of the Schwaben and then
jumped down into her trench. Many thought at the time that she was a
man masquerading for a bet, but long afterwards, when our men took the
Schwaben, they found her lying in the ruins dead. They buried her
there, up on the top of the hill. God alone knows who she was and what
she was doing there.

Looking back across the Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right
bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt.
All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust
up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef.
At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark
the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more
ragged than those near our old line.

There are few more lonely places than that scene of old battles. One
may stand on the Schwaben for many days together and look west over
the moor, or east over the wilderness, without seeing any sign of
human life, save perhaps some solitary guarding a dump of stores.

The hill on which the Schwaben is built is like a great thumb laid
down beside the Ancre River. There is a little valley on its eastern
side exactly like the space between a great thumb and a great
forefinger. It is called Crucifix Valley, from an iron Calvary that
stood in it in the early days of the war. It must once have been a
lovely and romantic glen, strangely beautiful throughout. Even now its
lower reach between a steep bank of scrub and Thiepval Wood is as
lovely as a place can be after the passing of a cyclone. Its upper
reach, which makes the eastern boundary of the Schwaben, is as ghastly
a scene of smash as the world can show. It is nothing but a collection
of irregular pools dug by big shells during months of battle. The
pools are long enough and deep enough to dive into, and full to
overflowing with filthy water. Sometimes the pressure of the water
bursts the mud banks of one of these pools and a rush of water comes,
and the pools below it overflow, and a noise of water rises in that
solitude which is like the mud and water of the beginning of the world
before any green thing appeared.

  [Illustration: The Leipzig Salient under Fire]

Our line runs across this Crucifix Valley in a strong sandbag
barricade. The enemy line crosses it higher up in a continuation of
the front line of the Schwaben. As soon as the lines are across the
valley they turn sharply to the south at an important point.

The Schwaben spur is like a thumb; Crucifix Valley is like the space
between a thumb and a forefinger. Just to the east of Crucifix Valley
a second spur thrusts away down to the south like a forefinger. It is
a long sloping spur, wooded at the lower end. It is known on the maps
as Thiepval Hill or the Leipzig Salient. When the lines turn to the
south after crossing Crucifix Valley they run along the side of this
hill and pass out of sight round the end. The lines are quite regular
and distinct. From the top of the Schwaben it looks as though the side
of the hill were fenced into a neat green track or racecourse. This
track is the No Man's Land, which lies like a broad green regular
stripe between brown expanses along the hillside. All this hill was of
the greatest importance to the enemy. It was as strong an eyrie as the
Schwaben; it turned and made very dangerous our works in front of
Hamel; and it was the key to a covered way to the plateau from which
all these spurs thrust southward.

It is a bolder, more regular spur than the others which thrust from
this plateau. The top slopes so slightly as to be almost level, the
two flanks are rather steep.

Right at the top of it, just where it springs from the plateau, much
where the knuckle of the imagined hand would be, and perhaps five
hundred yards east from our old sandbag barricade in Crucifix Valley,
there is a redness in the battered earth and upon the chalk of the
road. The redness is patchy over a good big stretch of this part of
the spur, but it is all within the enemy lines and well above our own.
Where the shattered hillside slopes towards our lines there are many
remnants of trees, some of them fruit trees arranged in a kind of
order behind the burnt relics of a hedge, others dotted about at
random. All are burnt, blasted, and killed. One need only glance at
the hill on which they stand to see that it has been more burnt and
shell-smitten than most parts of the lines. It is as though the fight
here had been more than to the death, to beyond death, to the bones
and skeleton of the corpse which was yet unkillable. This is the site
of the little hill village of Thiepval, which once stood at a
cross-roads here among apple orchards and the trees of a park. It had
a church, just at the junction of the roads, and a fine seigneurial
château, in a garden, beside the church; otherwise it was a little
lonely mean place, built of brick and plaster on a great lonely heap
of chalk downland. It had no importance and no history before the war,
except that a Seigneur of Thiepval is mentioned as having once
attended a meeting at Amiens. It was of great military importance at
the time of the Battle of the Somme. In the old days it may have had a
beauty of position.

It is worth while to clamber up to Thiepval from our lines. The road
runs through the site of the village in a deep cutting, which may have
once been lovely. The road is reddish with the smashed bricks of the
village. Here and there in the mud are perhaps three courses of brick
where a house once stood, or some hideous hole bricked at the bottom
for the vault of a cellar. Blasted, dead, pitted stumps of trees, with
their bark in rags, grow here and there in a collection of vast holes,
ten feet deep and fifteen feet across, with filthy water in them.
There is nothing left of the church; a big reddish mound of brick,
that seems mainly powder round a core of cement, still marks where the
château stood. The château garden, the round village pond, the
pine-tree which was once a landmark there, are all blown out of
recognition.

The mud of the Somme, which will be remembered by our soldiers long
after they have forgotten the shelling, was worse at Thiepval than
elsewhere, or, at least, could not have been worse elsewhere. The road
through Thiepval was a bog, the village was a quagmire. Near the
château there were bits where one sank to the knee. In the great
battle for Thiepval, on the 26th of last September, one of our Tanks
charged an enemy trench here. It plunged and stuck fast and remained
in the mud, like a great animal stricken dead in its spring. It was
one of the sights of Thiepval during the winter, for it looked most
splendid; afterwards, it was salved and went to fight again.

From this part of Thiepval one can look along the top of the Leipzig
Spur, which begins here and thrusts to the south for a thousand yards.

There are two big enemy works on the Leipzig Spur: one, well to the
south of the village, is (or was, for it is all blown out of shape) a
six-angled star-shaped redoubt called the Wonder Work; the other,
still further to the south, about a big, disused, and very
evil-looking quarry, towards the end of the spur, is, or was, called
the Leipzig Salient, or, by some people, the Hohenzollern, from the
Hohenzollern Trench, which ran straight across the spur about halfway
down the salient.

In these two fortresses the enemy had two strong, evil eyries, high
above us. They look down upon our line, which runs along the side of
the hill below them. Though, in the end, our guns blasted the enemy
off the hill, our line along that slope was a costly one to hold,
since fire upon it could be observed and directed from so many
points--from the rear (above Hamel), from the left flank (on the
Schwaben and near Thiepval), and from the hill itself. The hill is
all skinned and scarred, and the trace of the great works can no
longer be followed. At the top of the hill, in the middle of a filthy
big pool, is a ruined enemy trench-mortar, sitting up like a swollen
toad.

At the end of the spur the lines curve round to the east to shut in
the hill. A grass-grown road crosses the lines here, goes up to the
hill-top, and then along it. The slopes at this end of the hill are
gentle, and from low down, where our lines are, it is a pleasant and
graceful brae, where the larks never cease to sing and where you may
always put up partridges and sometimes even a hare. It is a deserted
hill at this time, but for the wild things. The No Man's Land is
littered with the relics of a charge; for many brave Dorsetshire and
Wiltshire men died in the rush up that slope. On the highest point of
the enemy parapet, at the end of the hill, is a lonely white cross,
which stands out like a banner planted by a conquerer. It marks the
grave of an officer of the Wilts, who was killed there, among the
ruin, in the July attack.

Below the lines, where the ground droops away toward the river, the
oddly shaped, deeply-vallied Wood of Authuille begins. It makes a
sort of socket of woodland so curved as to take the end of the spur.

It is a romantic and very lovely wood, pleasant with the noise of
water and not badly damaged by the fighting. The trees are alive and
leafy, the shrubs are pushing, and the spring flowers, wood anemones,
violets, and the oxlip (which in this country takes the place of the
primrose and the cowslip) flower beautifully among the shell-holes,
rags, and old tins of war. But at the north-eastern end it runs out in
a straggling spinney along the Leipzig's east flank, and this horn of
wood is almost as badly shattered as if the shell fire upon it had
been English. Here the enemy, fearing for his salient, kept up a
terrible barrage. The trees are burnt, ragged, unbarked, topped, and
cut off short, the trenches are blown in and jumbled, and the ground
blasted and gouged.

Standing in the old English front line just to the north of Authuille
Wood, one sees the usual slow gradual grassy rise to the dark enemy
wire. Mesnil stands out among its trees to the left; to the right is
this shattered stretch of wood, with a valley beyond it, and a rather
big, steep, green hill topped by a few trees beyond the valley. The
jut of the Leipzig shuts out the view to the flanks, so that one can
see little more than this.

The Leipzig, itself, like the Schwaben, is a hawk's nest or eyrie. Up
there one can look down by Authuille Wood to Albert church and
chimneys, the uplands of the Somme, the Amiens road, down which the
enemy marched in triumph and afterwards retreated in a hurry, and the
fair fields that were to have been the booty of this war. Away to the
left of this is the wooded clump of Bécourt, and, beyond it, One Tree
Hill with its forlorn mound, like the burial place of a King. On the
right flank is the Ancre Valley, with the English position round Hamel
like an open book under the eye; on the left flank is the rather big,
steep, green hill, topped by a few trees, before mentioned. These trees
grow in and about what was once the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle.
The hill does not seem to have a name; it may be called here Middle
Finger Hill or Ovillers Hill.

Like the Schwaben and the Leipzig Hills this hill thrusts out from the
knuckle of the big chalk plateau to the north of it like the finger of
a hand, in this case the middle finger. It is longer and less
regularly defined than the Leipzig Hill; because instead of ending, it
merges into other hills not quite so high. The valley which parts it
from the Leipzig is steeply sided, with the banks of great lynchets.
The lines cross the valley obliquely and run north and south along the
flank of this hill, keeping their old relative positions, the enemy
line well above our own, so that the approach to it is up a glacis.

  [Illustration: Dug-outs and barbed wire in La Boisselle. Usna-Tara
  Hill, with English Support Lines in Background. At Extreme Left is
  the Albert-Bapaume Road]

As one climbs up along our old line here, the great flank of Ovillers
Hill is before one in a noble, bare sweep of grass, running up to the
enemy line. Something in the make of this hill, in its shape, or in
the way it catches the light, gives it a strangeness which other parts
of the battlefield have not. The rise between the lines of the
trenches is fully two hundred yards across, perhaps more. Nearly all
over it, in no sort of order, now singly, now in twos or threes, just
as the men fell, are the crosses of the graves of the men who were
killed in the attack there. Here and there among the little crosses is
one bigger than the rest, to some man specially loved or to the men of
some battalion. It is difficult to stand in the old English line from
which those men started without the feeling that the crosses are the
men alive, still going forward, as they went in the July morning a
year ago.

Just within the enemy line, three-quarters of the way up the hill,
there is a sort of small flat field about fifty yards across where the
enemy lost very heavily. They must have gathered there for some rush
and then been caught by our guns.

At the top of the hill the lines curve to the southeast, drawing
closer together. The crest of the hill, such as it is, was not
bitterly disputed here, for we could see all that we wished to see of
the hill from the eastern flank. Our line passes over the spur
slightly below it, the enemy line takes in as much of it as the enemy
needed. From it, he has a fair view of Albert town and of the country
to the east and west of it, the wooded hill of Bécourt, and the hill
above Fricourt. From our line, we see his line and a few tree-tops.
From the eastern flank of the hill, our line gives a glimpse of the
site of the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, once one of the strong
places of the enemy, and now a few heaps of bricks, and one spike of
burnt ruin where the church stood.

Like most Picardy villages, Ovillers was compactly built of red brick
along a country road, with trees and orchards surrounding it. It had a
lofty and pretentious brick church of a modern type. Below and beyond
it to the east is a long and not very broad valley which lies between
the eastern flank of Ovillers Hill and the next spur. It is called
Mash Valley on the maps. The lines go down Ovillers Hill into this
valley and then across it.

Right at the upper end of this valley, rather more than a mile away,
yet plainly visible from our lines near Ovillers, at the time of the
beginning of the battle, were a few red-brick ruins in an irregular
row across the valley-head.

A clump of small fir and cypress trees stood up dark on the hill at
the western end of this row, and behind the trees was a line of green
hill topped with the ruins of a windmill. The ruins, now gone, were
the end of Pozières village, the dark trees grew in Pozières cemetery,
and the mill was the famous windmill of Pozières, which marked the
crest that was one of the prizes of the battle. All these things were
then clearly to be seen, though in the distance.

The main hollow of the valley is not remarkable except that it is
crossed by enormous trenches and very steeply hedged by a hill on its
eastern flank. This eastern hill which has such a steep side is a spur
or finger of chalk thrusting southward from Pozières, like the
ring-finger of the imagined hand. Mash Valley curves round its
finger-tip, and just at the spring of the curve the third of the four
Albert roads crosses it, and goes up the spur towards Pozières and
Bapaume. The line of the road, which is rather banked up, so as to be
a raised way, like so many Roman roads, can be plainly seen, going
along the spur, almost to Pozières. In many places, it makes the
eastern skyline to observers down in the valley.

Behind our front line in this Mash Valley is the pleasant green Usna
Hill, which runs across the hollow and shuts it in to the south. From
this hill, seamed right across with our reserve and support trenches,
one can look down at the enemy position, which crosses Mash Valley in
six great lines all very deep, strong, and dug into for underground
shelter.

Standing in Mash Valley, at the foot of Ring Finger Spur, just where
the Roman Road starts its long rise to Pozières, one sees a lesser
road forking off to the right, towards a village called Contalmaison,
a couple of miles away. The fork of the road marks where our old front
line ran. The trenches are filled in at this point now, so that the
roads may be used, but the place was once an exceedingly hot corner.
In the old days, all the space between the two roads at the fork was
filled with the village or hamlet of La Boisselle, which, though a
tiny place, had once a church and perhaps a hundred inhabitants. The
enemy fortified the village till it was an exceedingly strong place.
We held a part of the village cemetery. Some of the broken crosses of
the graves still show among the chalk here.

  [Illustration: Photograph showing the Scene of the Successful
  British Advance at La Boisselle, taken from the British Front
  Line]

To the left of the Roman Road, only a stone's throw from this ruined
graveyard, a part of our line is built up with now rotting sandbags
full of chalk, so that it looks like a mound of grey rocks. Opposite
the mound, perhaps a hundred yards up the hill, is another, much
bigger, irregular mound, of chalk that has become dirty, with some
relics of battered black wire at its base. The space between the two
mounds is now green with grass, though pitted with shell-holes, and
marked in many places with the crosses of graves. The space is the old
No Man's Land, and the graves are of men who started to charge across
that field on the 1st of July. The big grey mound is the outer wall or
casting of a mine thirty yards deep in the chalk and a hundred yards
across, which we sprang under the enemy line there on that summer
morning, just before our men went over.

La Boisselle, after being battered by us in our attack, was destroyed
by enemy fire after we had taken it, and then cleared by our men who
wished to use the roads. It offers no sight of any interest; but just
outside it, between the old lines, there is a stretch of spur, useful
for observation, for which both sides fought bitterly. For about 200
yards, the No Man's Land is a succession of pits in the chalk where
mines have been sprung. Chalk, wire, stakes, friends, and enemies seem
here to have been all blown to powder.

The lines cross this debated bit, and go across a small, ill-defined
bulk of chalk, known as Chapes Spur, on the top of which there is a
vast heap of dazzlingly white chalk, so bright that it is painful to
look at. Beyond it is the pit of a mine, evenly and cleanly blown,
thirty-five yards deep, and more than a hundred yards across, in the
pure chalk of the upland, as white as cherry blossom. This is the
finest, though not the biggest, mine in the battlefield. It was the
work of many months, for the shafts by which it was approached began
more than a quarter of a mile away. It was sprung on the 1st of July
as a signal for the attack. Quite close to it are the graves of an
officer and a sergeant, both English, who were killed in the attack a
few minutes after that chasm in the chalk had opened. The sergeant
was killed while trying to save his officer.

The lines bend down south-eastward from Chapes Spur, and cross a long,
curving, shallow valley, known as Sausage Valley, famous, later in the
battle, as an assembly place for men going up against Pozières. Here
the men in our line could see nothing but chalk slope to right, left,
or front, except the last tree of La Boisselle, rising gaunt and black
above the line of the hill. Just behind them, however, at the foot of
the Sausage Valley they had a pleasant wooded hill, the hill of
Bécourt, which was for nearly two years within a mile of the front
line, yet remained a green and leafy hill, covered with living trees,
among which the château of Bécourt remained a habitable house.

The lines slant in a south-easterly direction across the Sausage
Valley; they mount the spur to the east of it, and proceed, in the
same direction, across a bare field, like the top of a slightly tilted
table, in the long slope down to Fricourt. Here, the men in our front
lines could see rather more from their position. In front of them was
a smooth space of grass slightly rising to the enemy lines two hundred
yards away. Behind the enemy lines is a grassy space, and behind
this, there shows what seems to be a gully or ravine, beyond which the
high ground of another spur rises, much as the citadel of an old
encampment rises out of its walled ditch. This high ground of this
other spur is not more than a few feet above the ground near it, but
it is higher; it commands it. All the high ground is wooded. To the
southern or lower end of it the trees are occasional and much broken
by fire. To the northern or upper end they grow in a kind of wood
though all are much destroyed. Right up to the wood, all the high
ground bears traces of building; there are little tumbles of bricks
and something of the colour of brick all over the pilled, poxed, and
blasted heap that is so like an old citadel. The ravine in front of it
is the gully between the two spurs; it shelters the sunken road to
Contalmaison; the heap is Fricourt village, and the woodland to the
north is Fricourt Wood. A glance is enough to show that it is a strong
position.

To the left of Fricourt, the spur rises slowly into a skyline. To the
right the lines droop down the spur to a valley, across a brook and a
road in the valley, and up a big bare humping chalk hill placed at
right angles to the spur on which Fricourt stands.

The spur on which Fricourt stands and the spur down which the lines
run both end at the valley in a steep drop. Just above the steep fall
our men fought very hard to push back the enemy a little towards
Fricourt, so that he might not see the lower part of the valley, or be
able to enfilade our lines on the other side of it. For about three
hundred yards here the space between the lines is filled with the
craters of mines exploded under the enemy's front line. In some cases,
we seized and held the craters; in others the craters were untenable
by either side. Under one of those held by us it was found that the
enemy had sunk a big counter-mine, which was excavated and ready for
charging at the time of the beginning of the battle, when Fricourt
fell. This part of the line is more thickly coated with earth than
most of the chalk hills of the battlefield. The craters lie in a blown
and dug up wilderness of heaps of reddish earth, pocked with
shell-holes, and tumbled with wire. The enemy lines are much broken
and ruined, their parapets thrown down, the mouths of their dugouts
blown in, and their pride abased.

  [Illustration: A View of Fricourt]

The Fricourt position was one of the boasts of the enemy on this
front. Other places on the line, such as the Leipzig, the Schwaben,
and the trenches near Hamel, were strong, because they could be
supported by works behind them or on their flanks. Fricourt was strong
in itself, like Gommecourt. It was perhaps the only place in the field
of which it could be said that it was as strong as Gommecourt. As at
Gommecourt, it had a good natural glacis up to the front line, which
was deep, strong, and well wired. Behind the front line was a wired
second line, and behind that, the rising spur on which the village
stood, commanding both with machine-gun emplacements.

Fricourt was not captured by storm, but swiftly isolated and forced to
surrender. It held out not quite two days. It was the first first-rate
fortress taken by our men from the enemy in this engagement. In the
ruins, they saw for the first time the work which the enemy puts into
his main defences, and the skill and craft with which he provides for
his comfort. For some weeks, the underground arrangements of Fricourt,
the stairs with wired treads, the bolting holes, the air and escape
shafts, the living rooms with electric light, the panelled walls,
covered with cretonnes of the smartest Berlin patterns, the neat bunks
and the signs of female visitors, were written of in the press, so
that some may think that Fricourt was better fitted than other places
on the line. It is not so. The work at Fricourt was well done, but it
was no better than that at other places, where a village with cellars
in it had to be converted into a fortress. Our men took Fricourt at
the beginning of the battle, in a fair state of preservation. Such
work was then new to our men, and this good example was made much of.

  [Illustration: Looking at Fricourt and Fricourt Wood. Troops
  bivouac for a Short Rest under Ground Sheets laced together]

In the valley below the village, in great, deep, and powerfully
revetted works, the enemy had built himself gun emplacements, so
weighted with timber balks that they collapsed soon after his men
ceased to attend them. The line of these great works ran (as so many
of his important lines have run) at the foot of a steep bank or
lynchet, so that at a little distance the parapet of the work merged
into the bank behind it and was almost invisible.

This line of guns ran about east and west across the neck of the
Fricourt Salient, which thrust still further south, across the little
valley and up the hill on the other side.

Our old line crosses the valley just to the east of the Fricourt
Station on the little railway which once ran in the valley past
Fricourt and Mametz to Montauban. It then crossed the fourth of the
roads from Albert, at Fricourt cemetery, which is a small, raised
forlorn garden of broken tombs at cross-roads, under the hill facing
Fricourt. Here our line began to go diagonally up the lower slopes of
the hill. The enemy line climbed it further to the east, round the
bulging snout of the hill, at a steep and difficult point above the
bank of a sunken road. Towards the top of the hill the lines
converged.

All the way of the hill, the enemy had the stronger position. It was
above us almost invisible and unguessable, except from the air, at the
top of a steep climb up a clay bank, which in wet weather makes bad
going even for the Somme; and though the lie of the ground made it
impossible for him to see much of our position, it was impossible for
us to see anything or his or to assault him. The hill is a big steep
chalk hill, with contours so laid upon it that not much of it can be
seen from below. By looking to the left from our trenches on its
western lower slopes one can see nothing of Fricourt, for the bulge of
the hill's snout covers it. One has a fair view of the old English
line on the smoothish big slope between Fricourt and Bécourt, but
nothing of the enemy stronghold. One might have lived in those
trenches for nearly two years without seeing any enemy except the rain
and mud and lice.

Up at the top of the hill, there is an immense prospect over the
eastern half of the battlefield, and here, where the lines converge,
it was most necessary for us to have the crest and for the enemy to
keep us off it. The highest ground is well forward, on the snout, and
this point was the only part of the hill which the enemy strove to
keep. His line goes up the hill to the highest point, cuts off the
highest point, and at once turns eastward, so that his position on the
hill is just the northern slope and a narrow line of crest. It is as
though an army holding Fleet Street against an army on the Embankment
and in Cheapside should have seized Ludgate Hill to the top of the
steps of St. Paul's and left the body of the cathedral to its
opponent. The lines securing this important salient are of immense
strength and intricacy, with many great avenues of approach. The front
line is double across the greater part of the crest, and behind it is
a very deep, strong, trebly wired support line which is double at
important points.

  [Illustration: The Sandbags at the Fricourt Salient]

Our old front line runs almost straight across the crest parallel with
the enemy front line, and distant from it from forty to one hundred
and fifty yards. The crest or highest ground is on both flanks of the
hill-top close to the enemy line. Between the lines at both these
points are the signs of a struggle which raged for weeks and months
for the possession of those lumps of hill, each, perhaps, two hundred
yards long, by fifty broad, by five high. Those fifteen feet of height
were bartered for with more than their own weight of sweat and blood;
the hill can never lose the marks of the struggle.

In those two patches of the hill the space between the lines is a
quarry of confluent craters, twenty or thirty yards deep, blown into
and under each other till the top of the hill is split apart. No man
can now tell which of all these mines were sunk by our men. The quarry
runs irregularly in heaps and hollows of chalk and red earth mingled
like flesh and blood. On our side of the pits the marks of our
occupation are plain. There in several places, as at La Boisselle and
on the Beaucourt spur, our men have built up the parapet of our old
front line by thousands of sandbags till it is a hill-top or cairn
from which they could see beyond. The sandbags have rotted and the
chalk and flints within have fallen partly through the rags, and
Nature has already begun to change those heaps to her own colours, but
they will be there for ever as the mark of our race. Such monuments
must be as lasting as Stonehenge. Neither the mines nor the guns of
the enemy could destroy them. From among them our soldiers peered
through the smoke of burning and explosions at the promised land which
the battle made ours.

From those heaps there is a wide view over that part of the field. To
the left one sees Albert, the wooded clump of Bécourt, and a high
green spur which hides the Sausage Valley. To the front this green
spur runs to the higher ground from which the Fricourt spur thrusts.
On this higher ground, behind Fricourt and its wood, is a much bigger,
thicker, and better grown wood, about a mile and a half away; this is
the wood of Mametz. Some short distance to the left of this wood, very
plainly visible on the high, rather bare hill, is a clump of pollarded
trees near a few heaps of red brick. The trees were once the
shade-giving trees about the market-place of Contalmaison, a hamlet at
a cross-roads at this point. Behind these ruins the skyline is a kind
of ridge which runs in a straight line, broken in one place by a few
shatters of trees. These trees are the remains of the wood which once
grew outside the village of Pozières. The ridge is the Albert-Bapaume
Road, here passing over the highest ground on its path.

Turning from these distant places and looking to the right, one sees,
just below, twelve hundred yards to the east of Fricourt, across the
valley at the foot of this hill of the salient, the end of an
irregular spur, on which are the shattered bricks of the village of
Mametz before mentioned.

To the north of Mametz the ground rises. From the eyrie of the salient
one can look over it and away to the north to big rolling chalk land,
most of it wooded. Mametz Wood is a dark expanse to the front; to the
right of it are other woods, Bazentin Woods, Big and Little, and
beyond them, rather to the right and only just visible as a few sticks
upon the skyline, are two other woods, High Wood, like a ghost in the
distance, and the famous and terrible Wood of Delville. High Wood is
nearly five miles away and a little out of the picture. The other
wooded heights are about three miles away. All that line of high
ground marked by woods was the enemy second line, which with a few
slight exceptions was our front line before the end of the third week
of the battle.

From this hill-top of the salient the lines run down the north-eastern
snout of the hill and back across the valley, so as to shut in Mametz.
Then they run eastward for a couple of miles, up to and across a
plateau in front of the hamlet of Carnoy, which was just within our
line. From our line, in this bare and hideous field, little could be
seen but the slope up to the enemy line. At one point, where the road
or lane from Carnoy to Montauban crossed the enemy line, there was a
struggle for the power to see, and as a result of the struggle mines
and counter-mines were sprung here till the space between the lines is
now a chaos of pits and chasms full of water. The country here is an
expanse of smoothish tilted slopes, big, empty, and lonely, and
crossed (at about the middle point) by a strange narrow gut or gully,
up which the railway once ran to Montauban. No doubt there are places
in the English chalk counties which resemble this sweep of country,
but I know of none so bare or so featureless. The ground is of the
reddish earth which makes such bad mud. The slopes are big and
gradual, either up or down. Little breaks the monotony of the expanse
except a few copses or sites of copses; the eye is always turning to
the distance.

  [Illustration: View of Mametz]

In front, more than half a mile away, the ground reaches its highest
point in the ridge or bank which marks the road to Montauban. The big
gradual sweep up is only broken by lines of trenches and by mud heaped
up from the road. Some of the trees which once made Montauban
pleasant and shady still stand over the little heaps of brick and
solitary iron gate which show where the village used to stand. Rather
to the right of this, and nearer to our lines, are some irregular red
heaps with girders protruding from them. This is the enemy fortress of
the brickworks of Montauban. Beyond this, still further to the right,
behind the old enemy line, the ground loses its monotony and passes
into lovely and romantic sweeping valleys, which our men could not see
from their lines.

Well behind our English lines in this district and above the dip where
Carnoy stands, the fourth of the four roads from Albert runs eastward
along a ridge-top between a double row of noble trees which have not
suffered very severely, except at their eastern end. Just north of
this road, and a little below it on the slopes of the ridge, is the
village of Maricourt. Our line turns to the southeast opposite
Montauban, and curves in towards the ridge so as to run just outside
Maricourt, along the border of a little wood to the east of the
houses. From all the high ground to the north of it, from the enemy's
second line and beyond, the place is useful to give a traveller his
bearings. The line of plane-trees along the road on the ridge, and
the big clumps of trees round the village, are landmarks which cannot
be mistaken from any part of the field.

Little is to be seen from our line outside Maricourt Wood, except the
enemy line a little beyond it, and the trees of other woods behind it.

The line turns to the south, parallel with the wood, crosses the
fourth road (which goes on towards Peronne) and goes down some
difficult, rather lovely, steep chalk slopes, wooded in parts, to the
ruins of Fargny Mill on the Somme River.

The Somme River is here a very beautiful expanse of clear chalk water
like a long wandering shallow lake. Through this shallow lake the
river runs in half a dozen channels, which are parted and thwarted in
many places by marsh, reed-beds, osier plots, and tracts of swampy
woodland. There is nothing quite like it in England. The river-bed is
pretty generally between five and six hundred yards across.

Nearly two miles above the place where the old enemy line comes down
to the bank, the river thrusts suddenly north-westward, in a very
noble great horse-shoe, the bend of which comes at Fargny where our
lines touched it. The enemy line touched the horse-shoe close to our
own at a curious wooded bank or slope, known (from its shape on the
map, which is like a cocked hat) as the Chapeau de Gendarme. Just
behind our lines, at the bend, the horse-shoe sweeps round to the
south. The river-bed at once broadens to about two-thirds of a mile,
and the river, in four or five main channels, passes under a most
beautiful sweep of steep chalk cliff, not unlike some of the chalk
country near Arundel. These places marked the end of the British
sector at the time of the beginning of the battle. On the south or
left bank of the Somme River the ground was held by the French.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such was our old front line at the beginning of the battle, and so the
travellers of our race will strive to picture it when they see the
ground under the crops of coming Julys. It was never anything but a
makeshift, patched together, and held, God knows how, against greater
strength. Our strongest places were the half-dozen built-up
observation posts at the mines near Fricourt, Serre, and La Boisselle.
For the rest, our greatest strength was but a couple of sandbags deep.
There was no concrete in any part of the line, very few iron girders
and not many iron "humpies" or "elephant backs" to make the roofs of
dugouts. The whole line gives the traveller the impression that it was
improvised (as it was) by amateurs with few tools, and few resources,
as best they could, in a time of need and danger. Like the old,
hurriedly built Long Walls at Athens, it sufficed, and like the old
camps of Cæsar it served, till our men could take the much finer lines
of the enemy. A few words may be said about those enemy lines. They
were very different lines from ours.

The defences of the enemy front line varied a little in degree, but
hardly at all in kind, throughout the battlefield. The enemy wire was
always deep, thick, and securely staked with iron supports, which were
either crossed like the letter +X+, or upright, with loops to take the
wire and shaped at one end like corkscrews so as to screw into the
ground. The wire stood on these supports on a thick web, about four
feet high and from thirty to forty feet across. The wire used was
generally as thick as sailor's marline stuff, or two twisted
rope-yarns. It contained, as a rule, some sixteen barbs to the foot.
The wire used in front of our lines was generally galvanized, and
remained grey after months of exposure. The enemy wire, not being
galvanized, rusted to a black colour, and shows up black at a great
distance. In places this web or barrier was supplemented with
trip-wire, or wire placed just above the ground, so that the artillery
observing officers might not see it and so not cause it to be
destroyed. This trip-wire was as difficult to cross as the wire of the
entanglements. In one place (near the Y Ravine at Beaumont Hamel) this
trip-wire was used with thin iron spikes a yard long of the kind known
as calthrops. The spikes were so placed in the ground that about one
foot of spike projected. The scheme was that our men should catch
their feet in the trip-wire, fall on the spikes, and be transfixed.

In places, in front of the front line in the midst of his wire,
sometimes even in front of the wire, the enemy had carefully hidden
snipers and machine-gun posts. Sometimes these outside posts were
connected with his front-line trench by tunnels, sometimes they were
simply shell-holes, slightly altered with a spade to take the snipers
and the gunners. These outside snipers had some success in the early
parts of the battle. They caused losses among our men by firing in the
midst of them and by shooting them in the backs after they had
passed. Usually the posts were small oblong pans in the mud, in which
the men lay. Sometimes they were deep narrow graves in which the men
stood to fire through a funnel in the earth. Here and there, where the
ground was favourable, especially when there was some little knop,
hillock, or bulge of ground just outside their line, as near
Gommecourt Park and close to the Sunken Road at Beaumont Hamel, he
placed several such posts together. Outside Gommecourt, a slight
lynchet near the enemy line was prepared for at least a dozen such
posts invisible from any part of our line and not easily to be picked
out by photograph, and so placed as to sweep at least a mile of No
Man's Land.

  [Illustration: Sleighs used for conveying the Wounded through the
  Mud]

When these places had been passed, and the enemy wire, more or less
cut by our shrapnel, had been crossed, our men had to attack the enemy
fire trenches of the first line. These, like the other defences,
varied in degree, but not in kind. They were, in the main, deep, solid
trenches, dug with short bays or zigzags in the pattern of the Greek
Key or badger's earth. They were seldom less than eight feet and
sometimes as much as twelve feet deep. Their sides were revetted, or
held from collapsing, by strong wickerwork. They had good,
comfortable standing slabs or banquettes on which the men could stand
to fire. As a rule, the parapets were not built up with sandbags as
ours were.

In some parts of the line, the front trenches were strengthened at
intervals of about fifty yards by tiny forts or fortlets made of
concrete and so built into the parapet that they could not be seen
from without, even five yards away. These fortlets were pierced with a
foot-long slip for the muzzle of a machine gun, and were just big
enough to hold the gun and one gunner.

In the forward wall of the trenches were the openings of the shafts
which led to the front-line dugouts. The shafts are all of the same
pattern. They have open mouths about four feet high, and slant down
into the earth for about twenty feet at an angle of forty-five
degrees. At the bottom of the stairs which led down are the living
rooms and barracks which communicate with each other so that if a
shaft collapse the men below may still escape by another. The shafts
and living rooms are strongly propped and panelled with wood, and this
has led to the destruction of most of the few which survived our
bombardment. While they were needed as billets our men lived in them.
Then the wood was removed, and the dugout and shaft collapsed.

During the bombardment before an attack, the enemy kept below in his
dugouts. If one shaft were blown in by a shell, they passed to the
next. When the fire "lifted" to let the attack begin, they raced up
the stairs with their machine guns and had them in action within a
minute. Sometimes the fire was too heavy for this, for trench,
parapet, shafts, dugouts, wood, and fortlets, were pounded out of
existence, so that no man could say that a line had ever run there;
and in these cases the garrison was destroyed in the shelters. This
happened in several places, though all the enemy dugouts were kept
equipped with pioneer tools by which buried men could dig themselves
out.

The direction of the front-line trenches was so inclined with bends,
juts, and angles as to give flanking fire upon attackers.

At some little distance behind the front line (a hundred yards or so)
was a second fire line, wired like the first, though less elaborate
and generally without concrete fortlets. This second line was usually
as well sited for fire as the front line. There were many
communication trenches between the two lines. Half a mile behind the
second line was a third support line; and behind this, running along
the whole front, a mile or more away, was the prepared second main
position, which was in every way like the front line, with wire,
concrete fortlets, dugouts, and a difficult glacis for the attacker to
climb.

The enemy batteries were generally placed behind banks or lynchets
which gave good natural cover; but in many places he mounted guns in
strong permanent emplacements, built up of timber balks, within a
couple of miles (at Fricourt within a quarter of a mile) of his front
line. In woods from the high trees of which he could have clear
observation, as in the Bazentin, Bernafay, and Trones Woods, he had
several of these emplacements, and also stout concrete fortlets for
heavy single guns.

All the enemy position on the battlefield was well gunned at the time
of the beginning of the battle. In modern war, it is not possible to
hide preparations for an attack on a wide front. Men have to be
brought up, trenches have to be dug, the artillery has to prepare, and
men, guns, and trenches have to be supplied with food, water, shells,
sandbags, props, and revetments. When the fire on any sector increases
tenfold, while the roads behind the lines are thronged with five times
the normal traffic of troops and lorries, and new trenches, the attack
or "jumping-off" trenches, are being dug in front of the line, a
commander cannot fail to know that an attack is preparing. These
preparations must be made and cannot be concealed from observers in
the air or on the ground. The enemy knew very well that we were about
to attack upon the Somme front, but did not know at which point to
expect the main thrust. To be ready, in any case, he concentrated guns
along the sector. It seems likely that he expected our attack to be an
attempt to turn Bapaume by a thrust from the west, by Gommecourt,
Puisieux, Grandcourt. In all this difficult sector his observations
and arrangements for cross-fire were excellent. He concentrated a
great artillery here (it is a legend among our men that he brought up
a hundred batteries to defend Gommecourt alone). In this sector, and
in one other place a little to the south of it, his barrage upon our
trenches, before the battle, was very accurate, terrible, and deadly.

Our attacks were met by a profuse machine-gun fire from the trench
parapets and from the hidden pits between and outside the lines. There
was not very much rifle fire in any part of the battle, but all the
hotly fought for strongholds were defended by machine guns to the
last. It was reported that the bodies of some enemy soldiers were
found chained to their guns, and that on the bodies of others were
intoxicating pills, designed to madden and infuriate the takers before
an attack. The fighting in the trenches was mainly done by bombing
with hand-grenades, of which the enemy had several patterns, all
effective. His most used type was a grey tin cylinder, holding about a
pound of explosive, and screwed to a wooden baton or handle about a
foot long for the greater convenience of throwing.

       *       *       *       *       *

Early in the spring of 1916, it was determined that an attack should
be made by our armies upon these lines of the enemy, so as to bring
about a removal of the enemy guns and men, then attacking the French
at Verdun and the Russians on the eastern front.

Preparations for this attack were made throughout the first half of
the year. New roads were cut, old roads were remetalled, new lines of
railways were surveyed and laid, and supplies and munitions were
accumulated not far from the front. Pumping stations were built and
wells were sunk for the supply of water to the troops during the
battle. Fresh divisions were brought up and held ready behind the
line. An effort was made to check the enemy's use of aeroplanes. In
June, our Air Service in the Somme sector made it so difficult for the
enemy to take photographs over our lines that his knowledge of our
doings along the front of the planned battle was lessened and
thwarted. At the same time, many raids were made by our aeroplanes
upon the enemy's depots and magazines behind his front. Throughout
June, our infantry raided the enemy line in many places to the north
of the planned battle. It seems possible that these raids led him to
think that our coming attack would be made wholly to the north of the
Ancre River.

  [Illustration: The Assault on July 1, 1916, at La Boisselle]

During the latter half of June, our armies concentrated a very great
number of guns behind the front of the battle. The guns were of every
kind, from the field gun to the heaviest howitzer. Together they made
what was at that time by far the most terrible concentration of
artillery ever known upon a battlefield. Vast stores of shells of
every known kind were made ready, and hourly increased.

As the guns came into battery, they opened intermittent fire, so that,
by the 20th of June, the fire along our front was heavier than it had
been before. At the same time, the fire of the machine guns and trench
mortars in our trenches became hotter and more constant. On the 24th
of June this fire was increased, by system, along the front designed
for the battle, and along the French front to the south of the Somme,
until it reached the intensity of a fire of preparation. Knowing, as
they did, that an attack was to come, the enemy made ready and kept on
the alert. Throughout the front, they expected the attack for the next
morning.

The fire was maintained throughout the night, but no attack was made
in the morning, except by aeroplanes. These raided the enemy
observation balloons, destroyed nine of them, and made it impossible
for the others to keep in the air. The shelling continued all that
day, searching the line and particular spots with intense fire and
much asphyxiating gas. Again the enemy prepared for an attack in the
morning, and again there was no attack, although the fire of
preparation still went on. The enemy said, "To-morrow will make three
whole days of preparation; the English will attack to-morrow." But
when the morning came, there was no attack, only the never-ceasing
shelling, which seemed to increase as time passed. It was now
difficult and dangerous to move within the enemy lines. Relieving
exhausted soldiers, carrying out the wounded, and bringing up food
and water to the front, became terrible feats of war. The fire
continued and increased, all that day and all the next day, and the
day after that. It darkened the days with smoke and lit the nights
with flashes. It covered the summer landscape with a kind of haze of
hell, earth-coloured above fields and reddish above villages, from the
dust of blown mud and brick flung up into the air. The tumult of these
days and nights cannot be described nor imagined. The air was without
wind yet it seemed in a hurry with the passing of death. Men knew not
which they heard, a roaring that was behind and in front, like a
presence, or a screaming that never ceased to shriek in the air. No
thunder was ever so terrible as that tumult. It broke the drums of the
ears when it came singly, but when it rose up along the front and gave
tongue together in full cry it humbled the soul. With the roaring,
crashing, and shrieking came a racket of hammers from the machine guns
till men were dizzy and sick from the noise, which thrust between
skull and brain, and beat out thought. With the noise came also a
terror and an exultation, that one should hurry, and hurry, and hurry,
like the shrieking shells, into the pits of fire opening on the hills.
Every night in all this week the enemy said, "The English will attack
to-morrow," and in the front lines prayed that the attack might come,
that so an end, any end, might come to the shelling.

It was fine, cloudless, summer weather, not very clear, for there was
a good deal of heat haze and of mist in the nights and early mornings.
It was hot yet brisk during the days. The roads were thick in dust.
Clouds and streamers of chalk dust floated and rolled over all the
roads leading to the front, till men and beasts were grey with it.

At half-past six in the morning of the 1st of July all the guns on our
front quickened their fire to a pitch of intensity never before
attained. Intermittent darkness and flashing so played on the enemy
line from Gommecourt to Maricourt that it looked like a reef on a
loppy day. For one instant it could be seen as a white rim above the
wire, then some comber of a big shell struck it fair and spouted it
black aloft. Then another and another fell, and others of a new kind
came and made a different darkness, through which now and then some
fat white wreathing devil of explosion came out and danced. Then it
would show out, with gaps in it, and with some of it level with the
field, till another comber would fall and go up like a breaker and
smash it out of sight again. Over all the villages on the field there
floated a kind of bloody dust from the blasted bricks.

In our trenches after seven o'clock on that morning, our men waited
under a heavy fire for the signal to attack. Just before half-past
seven, the mines at half a dozen points went up with a roar that shook
the earth and brought down the parapets in our lines. Before the
blackness of their burst had thinned or fallen the hand of Time rested
on the half-hour mark, and along all that old front line of the
English there came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave
climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of
death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across the
No Man's Land to begin the Battle of the Somme.



                           THE END



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