ace. A
few pink walls could then be half seen behind the branches, or topping
the gaps in the scrub.

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