AN ABYSM OF DESOLATION
_France, August 1st._
When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation
could reach. A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under
which men had burrowed like rats, but with method, so as to make a city
underneath the shattered foundations of the village. And then their rat
city had been crushed in from above; and through the splintered timbered
entrances you peered into a dark interior of dishevelled blankets and
scattered clothing. It was only too evident that there had been no time
as yet, in the hustle of battle, to search these ghastly, noisome
dug-outs for the Germans who had been bombed there. The mine craters in
the white chalk of La Boiselle are big enough to hide a large church.
But for sheer desolation it will not compare with Pozières. On the top
of a gently rising hill, over which the Roman road ran as is the way
with Roman roads, was a pretty village, with its church, its cemetery
under the shady trees; its orchards and picturesque village houses. When
the lines crystallised in front of Albert it was some miles behind the
German trenches. Our guns put a few shells into it; but six weeks ago it
was still a country village, somewhat wrecked but probably used for the
headquarters of a German regiment. Then came the British bombardment for
a week before the battle of the Somme.
The bombardment shattered Pozières. Its buildings were scattered as you
would scatter a house of toy bricks. Its trees began to look ragged. By
the time Boiselle and Ovilliers were taken, and the front had pushed up
to within a quarter or half a mile of Pozières, a tattered wood was all
that marked the spot. Behind the brushwood you could still see in three
or four places the remains of a pink wall. Some way to the north-east of
the village, near the actual summit of the hill, was a low heap of
bleached terra-cotta. It was the stump of the Pozières windmill.
Since then Pozières has had our second bombardment, and a German
bombardment which lasted four days, in addition to the normal German
barrage across the village which has never really ceased. You can
actually see more of the buildings than before. That is to say, you can
see any brick or stone that stands. For the brushwood and tattered
branches which used to hide the road have gone; and all that remain are
charred tree stumps standing like a line of broken posts. The upland
around was once cultivated land, and it should be green with the weeds
of two years. It is as brown as the veldt. Over the whole face of the
country shells have ploughed up the land literally as with a gigantic
plough, so that there is more red and brown earth than green. From the
distance all the colour is given by these upturned crater edges, and the
country is wholly red.
[Illustration: A MAIN STREET OF POZIÈRES IN A QUIET INTERVAL DURING THE
FIGHT]
[Illustration: THE CHURCH, POZIÈRES]
But even this did not prepare one for the desolation of the place
itself. Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have
been cast for years outside some dry, derelict, God-forsaken up-country
township. Imagine some broken-down creek bed in the driest of our dry
central Australian districts, abandoned for a generation to the goats,
in which the hens have been scratching as long as men can remember. Then
take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving
thing. You must not even leave a spider. Put here, in evidence of some
old tumbled roof, a few roof beams and tiles sticking edgeways from the
ground, and the low faded ochre stump of the windmill peeping over the
top of the hill, and there you have Pozières.
I know of nothing approaching that desolation. Perhaps it is that the
place is still in the thick of the fight. In most other ruins behind
battlefields that I have seen there are the signs of men again--perhaps
men who have visited the place like yourself. There is life, anyhow,
somewhere in the landscape. In this place there is no sign of life at
all. When you stand in Pozières to-day, and are told that you will find
the front trench across another hundred yards of shell-holes, you know
that there must be life in the landscape. The dead hill-side a few
hundred yards before you must contain both your men and the Germans. But
as in most battlefields, where the warmest corner is, there is the least
sign of movement. Dry shell crater upon shell crater upon shell
crater--all bordering one another until some fresh salvo shall fall and
assort the old group of craters into a new one, to be reassorted again
and again as the days go on. It is the nearest thing to sheer desert
that I have seen since certain lonely rides into the old Sahara at the
back of Mena Camp two years ago. Every minute or two there is a crash.
Part of the desert bumps itself up into huge red or black clouds and
subsides again. Those eruptions are the only movement in Pozières.
That is the country in which our boys are fighting the greatest battle
Australians have ever fought. Of the men whom you find there, what can
one say? Steadfast until death, just the men that Australians at home
know them to be; into the place with a joke, a dry, cynical, Australian
joke as often as not; holding fast through anything that man can
imagine; stretcher bearers, fatigue parties, messengers, chaplains,
doing their job all the time, both new-joined youngsters and old hands,
without fuss, but steadily, because it _is_ their work. They are not
heroes; they do not want to be thought or spoken of as heroes. They are
just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country
would wish them to do it. And pray God Australians in days to come will
be worthy of them!