; small, sluggish streams, lessening to mere trickles of water
as you rise, cut the clay; and the landscape, though at the watershed
itself one is standing at a height of 500 feet above the sea, has the
appearance of a plain. It is indeed difficult, without the aid of a map,
to decide when one has passed from the one to the other side of the water
parting, and the actual summit is, at this season of the year, a confused,
flat stretch of open stubble fallow, and here and there coarse, heathy,
untilled land. For two or three miles every way this level stretches,
hummocked by slight rolls between stream and stream, and upon the actual
watershed marked by one or two stagnant ponds. Seven miles behind you as
you stand upon the battlefield lies the little French market town of
Bavai, which was for centuries one of the great centres of Roman rule. It
was the capital of the Nervii. Seven great Roman roads still strike out
from it, to Rheims, to Cologne, to Utrecht, to Amiens, to the sea. Two in
particular, that to Treves and that to Cologne, spreading gradually apart
like the two neighbouring fingers of a hand, are the natural ways by which
an army advancing to such a field or retreating from it would communicate
with Bavai as a base.[8]

The outstanding feature of this terrain is not that it is the summit of a
watershed; indeed, as I have said, but for a map one would not guess that
it bore this character, and to the eye it presents the appearance of a
plain; it is rather the symmetrical arrangement of it as a broad belt of
open land, flanked upon either side north and south by two great woods.
That upon the right is known as the wood of Laniere, that upon the left
bears several names in its various parts, and is easiest to remember under
the general title of "The Forest of Sars." The gap between these two woods
narrows to a line which is precisely 2000 yards in extent and runs from
north-west to south-east, the two nearest points where either wood
approaches the other being distant one from another by that distance and
bearing one to the other upon those points of the compass. The French
army, therefore, drawn up on the open land and stretching from wood to
wood, faced somewhat north of east. The allies, drawn up a mile and a
half away on the broad beginning of that gap, looked somewhat south of
west. Behind the latter at a day's march was Mons; behind the former some
seven miles was Bavai; and the modern frontier as well as th