Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some “hundred-handed Gyas” had been mixing and kneading them into a devil’s dough.  There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see.  Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake between the holes.  But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the countryside.

Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course.  “British!” says the officer in front—­who was himself in the battle.  Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of the German front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get our bearings.  There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, are two trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, the British and the enemy front lines.  From that further line, at half-past seven on the summer morning for ever blazoned in the annals of our people, the British Army went over the parapet, to gather in the victory prepared for it by the deadly strength and accuracy of British guns; made possible in its turn by the labour in far-off England of millions of workers—­men and women—­on the lathes and in the filling factories of these islands.

We move on up the road.  Now we are among what remains of the trenches and dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig’s despatch.  “During nearly two years’ preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render these defences impregnable,” says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on to describe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters, and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the winter has made us at home—­on paper—­so familiar.  “The numerous woods and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses.”  The deep cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars.  The dug-outs were often two storeys deep, “and connected by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground.”  Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements—­everything that the best brains of the German Army could devise for our destruction—­had been lavished on the German lines.  And behind the first line was a second—­and behind the second line a third.  And now here we stand in the midst of what was once so vast a system.  What remains of it—­and of all the workings of the German mind that devised it?  We leave the motor and go to look into the dug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germans flung themselves at the approach