Before I visited the recaptured villages in the zone of the actual fighting, I had an idea that their evacuation was only temporary, that as soon as the war line moved towards Germany the people of the devastated villages would return to build their houses and till their fields again.  But I see now that not only are homes and villages destroyed almost beyond recognition, but the very fields are destroyed.  They are wildernesses of shell craters; the old worked soil is buried and great slabs of crude earth have been flung up over it.  No ordinary plough will travel over this frozen sea, let along that everywhere chunks of timber, horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of big shells, and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the mess.  Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high explosives, and across it run the twisting trenches and communication trenches eight, ten, or twelve feet deep.  These will become water pits and mud pits into which beasts will fall.  It is incredible that there should be crops from any of this region of the push for many years to come.  There is no shade left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the spirit to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are the sole proofs that life may still go on.

The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are obliterated.  It is just possible to trace the roads in them, because the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing of the guns and ammunition.  Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-outs.  One dug-out in particular there promises to become a show place.  It must be the masterpiece of some genius for dug-outs; it is made as if its makers enjoyed the job; it is like the work of some horrible badger among the vestiges of what were pleasant human homes.  You are taken down a timbered staircase into its warren of rooms and passages; you are shown the places under the craters of the great British shells, where the wood splintered but did not come in. (But the arrival of those shells must have been a stunning moment.) There are a series of ingenious bolting shafts set with iron climbing bars.  In this place German officers and soldiers have lived continually for nearly two years.  This war is, indeed, a troglodytic propaganda.  You come up at last at the far end into what was once a cellar of a decent Frenchman’s home.

But there are stranger subterranean refuges than that at Fricourt.  At Dompierre the German trenches skirted the cemetery, and they turned the dead out of their vaults and made lurking places of the tombs.  I walked with M. Joseph Reinach about this place, picking our way carefully amidst the mud holes and the wire, and watched the shells bursting away over the receding battle line to the west.  The wreckage of the graves was Durereqsue.  And here would be a fragment of marble angle and here a split stone with an inscription.  Splinters of coffins, rusty iron crosses and the petals of tin flowers were trampled into the mud, amidst the universal barbed wire.  A little distance down the slope is a brand new cemetery, with new metal wreaths and even a few flowers; it is a disciplined array of uniform wooden crosses, each with its list of soldiers’ names.  Unless I am wholly mistaken in France no Germans will ever get a chance for ever more to desecrate that second cemetery as they have done its predecessor.