Within four days the screen in front of Pozieres had been torn to shreds—­had utterly disappeared.  The German bombardment ripped off all that the British had left.  The buildings now stood up quite naked, such as they were.  There was the church—­still recognisable by one window; and a scrap of red wall at the north-east end of the village, past which you then had to crawl to reach an isolated run of trench facing the windmill.  Both trench and red wall have long since gone to glory.  I doubt if you could even trace either of them now.  The solitary arched window disappeared early, and a tumbled heap of bricks is all that now marks Pozieres church.  One scrap of gridironed roof sticking out from the powdered ground cross-hatches the horizon.  There is not so much foliage left as would shelter a cock sparrow.

But here were we, with this desolation behind us, looking out suddenly and at no great distance on quite a respectable wood.  It tempted you to step out there and just walk over to it—­I never see that country without the feeling that one is quite free to step across there and explore it.

There are men coming up the farther side of the slope—­men going about some normal business of the day as our men go about theirs in the places behind their lines.

Those men are Germans; and the village in the trees, the collection of buildings half guessed in the wood, is Courcelette.  It has been hidden ground to us for so long that you feel it is almost improper to be overlooking them so constantly; like spending your day prying over into your neighbour’s yard.  Away in the landscape behind, in some hollow, there humps itself into the air a big geyser of chestnut dust.  One has seen German shell burst so often in that fashion, back in our hinterland, that it takes a moment to realise that this shell is not German but British.  I cannot see what it is aimed at—­some battery, I suppose; or perhaps a much-used road; or some place they suspect to be a headquarters.  Clearly, it is not always so safe as it seems to be in the green country behind the German lines.

CHAPTER XIX

TROMMELFEUER

France, August 21st.

The Germans call it Trommelfeuer—­drum fire.  I do not know any better description for the distant sound of it.  We hear it every day from some quarter of this wide battlefield.  You will be sitting at your tea, the normal spasmodic banging of your own guns sounding in the nearer positions five, ten, perhaps fifteen times in the minute.  Suddenly, from over the distant hills, to left or right, there breaks out the roll of a great kettledrum, ever so far away.  Someone is playing the tattoo softly and very quickly.  If it is nearer, and especially if it is German, it sounds as if he played it on an iron ship’s tank instead.

That is Trommelfeuer—­what we call intense bombardment.  When it is very rapid—­like the swift roll of a kettledrum—­you take it that it must be the French seventy-fives down South preparing the way for a French assault.  But it is often our own guns after all—­I doubt if there are many who can really distinguish between the distant sound of them.