ralians the rifles must have been the rifles of
Germans, in trenches or shell-holes, somewhere on the face of that
waste. Who these Australians were, the men who watched from where we
stood did not know. Apparently they were men who had lost their way in
the dark and wandered beyond our trenches; as the light grew they had
suddenly realised that they were in front of our front line, and not
behind it, as they thought, and had come tumbling back over the craters.
They all reached the trench safely.

For this battle has now reached such a formless, featureless landscape,
that it is a hard thing to tell whether you are looking at your own
country or the German country, or the country between the lines. The
stretch between the two sides has for the moment widened, the Germans
abandoning many of their waterlogged, sodden ditches close in front of
our lines, and contenting themselves with fighting a sort of rearguard
action there, while they tunnel, bore, dig, burrow like moles into the
farther heights where their reserve line runs near Bapaume. The battle
has widened out generally over the landscape.

It is a very great difference from that boiling, bursting nightmare of
Pozieres, where the whole struggle tightened down to little more than
one narrow hill-top. This battle is now being fought in a sort of
dreamland of brown mudholes, which the blue northern mist turns to a
dull purple grey. The shape of the land is there, the hills, valleys,
lines of willow stumps, ends of broken telegraph poles. But the colour
is all gone. It is as though the bed of the ocean had suddenly risen, as
though the ocean depths had become valleys and the ocean mudbanks hills,
and the whole earth were a creation of slime. It is as though you
suddenly looked out upon the birth of the world, before the grass had
yet begun to spring and when the germs of primitive life still lay in
the slime which covered it; an old, old age before anything moved on the
earth or sang in the air, and when the naked bones of the earth lay bare
under the naked sky century after century, with no change or movement
save when the cloud shadows chased across it, or the storms lashed it,
or the evening sunlight glinted from the water trapped in its
meaningless hollows. It is to that unremembered chaos that German ideas
of life have reduced the world.

Up the hill-side opposite there is running a strange purple-grey streak
between two purple-grey banks. There is something my