Through this rubbish heap were scattered odd fragments of farming machinery—­here an old wagon wheel—­there a ploughshare or a portion of a harrow—­in another place some old iron press of which I do not know the use.  The rest of the village was like a deserted brick-field, or the remains of some ancient mining camp—­I do not think there were three fragments of wall over 10 feet high left.  And in and out of this debris wandered the German front line.  We jumped down into those trenches where some shell had broken them in.  They were deep and narrow, such as we had in Gallipoli.  Back from them led narrow, deep, winding communication trenches which, curiously enough, in parts where we saw them, seemed to have no supports to their walls such as all the trenches in the wet country farther north must have.  Here and there some shell-burst had broken or shaken them in.

As we made our way along the front line we found, every few yards or so, a low, squared, timbered opening below the parapet.  A dozen wooden steps led down and forwards into some dark interior far below.

We clambered down into the first of these chambers.  It was exactly as its occupants had left it.  On the floor amongst some tumbled blankets and odd pieces of clothing, socks for the most part, was scattered a stock of German grenades, each like a grey jampot with a short handle.  The blankets had come from a series of bunks which almost filled up the whole dark chamber.  These bunks were made roughly of wood, in pairs one over another, packed into every corner of the narrow space with as much ingenuity as the berths in an emigrant ship.  There were, I think, six of them in that first chamber.  Inlet into the wall, at the end of one set of bunks, was a wooden box doing service for a cupboard.  In it were a penny novel, and three or four bottles of a German table water.  At least one of these was still full.  So the garrison of Fricourt was not as hard put to it for supplies as some of the German prisoners with whom I spoke the day before.  They had told me that for three or four days no water could be brought to them up their communication trenches owing to the British bombardment.

I expect that the garrison of Fricourt had been almost entirely in those dug-outs during the bombardment.  The chambers seemed to have more than one entrance in some cases, and one suspects they also led into one another underground.  A subterranean passage led forward beneath the parapet to a door opening into No Man’s Land—­you could see the daylight at the end of it.

The fire trench was battered in places out of recognition.  But here and there we came across a bay of it which the bombardment had left more or less untouched.  There were slings of cartridges still hanging against the wall of the trench.  There were the two steel plates through which they had peered out into No Man’s Land, the slits in them half covered by the flap so as just to give a man room to peep through them.  There was the machine-gun platform, with a long, empty belt still lying on it.  There was the periscope standing on its spike, which had been stuck into the trench wall.  It looked out straight across No Man’s Land, but both mirrors were gone.