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.