my fancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, were for the moment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had rolled here and extinguished all life.  Beside the road only the blood-red soil betrayed the sites of powdered villages; and through it, in every direction, trenches had been cut.  Between the trenches the earth was torn and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing process, in its moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus.  On the hummocks were graves, graves marked by wooden crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the ground.  Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon that had cost priceless hours of skilled labour; and once we were confronted by one of those monsters, wounded to the death, I had seen that morning.  The sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emotions I had felt, as a child, when contemplating dead elephants in a battle picture of the army of a Persian king.

Presently, like the peak of some submerged land, we saw lifted out of that rolling waste the “Butt” of Warlencourt—­the burial-mound of this modern Marathon.  It is honeycombed with dugouts in which the Germans who clung to it found their graves, while the victorious British army swept around it toward Bapaume.  Everywhere along that road, which runs like an arrow across the battle-field to Albert, were graves.  Repetition seems the only method of giving an adequate impression of their numbers; and near what was once the village of Pozieres was the biggest grave of all, a crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across.  Seven months the British sappers had toiled far below in the chalk, digging the passage and chamber; and one summer dawn, like some tropical volcano, it had burst directly under the German trench.  Long we stood on the slippery edge of it, gazing down at the tangled wire and litter of battle that strewed the bottom, while the rain fell pitilessly.  Just such rain, said my officer-guide, as had drenched this country through the long winter months of preparation.  “We never got dry,” he told me; and added with a smile, in answer to my query:  “Perhaps that was the reason we never caught colds.”

When we entered Albert, the starting point of the British advance, there was just light enough to see the statue of the Virgin leaning far above us over the street.  The church-tower on which it had once stood erect had been struck by a German shell, but its steel rod had bent and not broken.  Local superstition declares that when the Virgin of Albert falls the war will be ended.

IV