Y GULLY.
Between Beaumont-Hamel and Beaucourt, near the bend which the Ancre
makes where it turns to meet the Somme, there is a deep gully, about
three hundred yards across, which the Tommies have christened--probably
they were a trifle short of words that day--with the last letter but
one of the alphabet. It is called Y Gully.
Up to the very last fight on the Ancre the German lines ran in front
of this gully, to the West. The enemy made use of this most valuable
hollow to conceal there his reserves of men and ammunition. Its western
cliffs could easily afford cover to a full brigade of infantry--and,
indeed, they did so. At the bottom of the ravine runs a railway, in
peace time of the ordinary gauge. The Germans, however, had found
occasion to substitute for it a Décauville, and this was used, under
the protection of the little valley, by the three German lines which
defended the summit against the British troops. The position seemed to
be one of tremendous strength.
One could almost detest Nature, so often and so terribly does she
seem to make herself the confederate of our most formidable enemies.
But mankind, in the person of our British Allies, has revenged itself
upon her for this undesirable amiability, and out of a pretty winding
valley, over whose blossoming soil the feet of lovers were wont to
stray, has created this blasted gorge, this Gorge of Death, this Valley
of Jehoshaphat, where one expects at every turn to meet with some
mourning Jeremiah.
The Tommies who have opened the road for us to this abode of misery had
to overcome the greatest difficulties. I have already described this
battlefield at the very moment of the offensive, while it was still
covered by its dead. I could not find, on this my second visit, a trace
of those poor bodies which the grave-diggers had just finished hiding
out of sight. The Tommies who fell in this fight were collected into
vast common graves, which kindly hands have marked out with frames
of pebbles. As for the German bodies, they were buried in their own
trenches--to fill them up was all that was necessary--or in the shell
craters where the machine-gun had dropped them. And so in this ravine
Death is on every side, and the ground has, in many places, taken the
shapes of the bodies that lie beneath it.
The eyes of all the "poilus"--the real ones, the men of Douaumont, and
Vaux, and the ravine of La Caillette, and many another of these lunar
landscapes--have rested upon similar scenes, which remind one a little
of those undistinguished districts in the suburbs of Paris where the
dustmen come to shoot their rubbish.
The earth, which one might take to have been brought here in ten
thousand carts, is nothing, so far as the eye can carry, but little
dusty craters, so thickly scattered that their overlapping sides break
into one another.
They are of every size, according to the calibre of the shells which
have made them. Inside these innumerable volcanoes are scattered,
pell-mell among the hardly-covered bodies, all the small possessions of
the soldier, with shells that have not burst, bombs, books, letters,
bandages, blood....
Such is the Gully in all its tragic beauty, with its heaped-up
soil, its road destroyed, its few trees in splinters, its scattered
graves, its scent of death, its heavy silence, its sides pitted with
shell-holes and smashed dug-outs, its dead horses and their carrion
flesh.
On the right, the Ancre, swollen by the rain, flows, indifferent and
peaceful, beside its slaughtered poplars; and on the left bank the
houses of bombarded Gueudecourt, the ruins of Thiepval, and all the
mourning landscape that surrounds us, seem to advise us not to let our
eyes linger upon the ravine, and to tell us that all Nature is worthy
of our pity and that the earth has become indeed the great valley of
tears of which the psalmist sings.