sterious in this
flat ribbon, ruled, as if by the hand of man, across that primeval
colourless slope. The line of it can be traced distinctly over the hill
and out of sight. It takes a moment's thinking to realise that the grey
streak was once a road. It is a road which one has read of as the centre
of some desultory fighting. I dare say it will appear in its own small
way in history. "The battalion next attacked along the Bapaume-Cambrai
road"--to give it a name it does not own; and readers will picture the
troops in khaki dodging along a hedge, beneath green, leafy elm
trees....

Something moved. Yes, as I live, something is moving up that old
purple-grey scar across the hill-side. Two figures in pink, untanned
leather waistcoats are strolling up the old road, side by side. Their
hands are in their trousers pockets, and the only sign of war visible
about them is their copper-green hats. A sniper's rifle pecks somewhere
in the landscape thereabout, but the two figures do not even turn a
head. They are Bill and Jim from South Melbourne let loose upon the
antediluvian landscape, strolling up it, yawning. And they gave me much
the same shock as if some green and pink animal had suddenly issued from
its unsuspected burrow in a field of primeval grey slime and begun
crawling over its face to some haunt in the slime elsewhere. Two other
distant figures were moving on the far hill-side too. Perhaps it was at
them the rifle was pecking; for to our certain knowledge the crest of
that hill was German territory.

Men lose their bearings in that sort of country every day. Germans find
themselves behind our lines without knowing that they have even passed
over their own; and an Australian carrying party has been known to
deposit its hot food, in the warm food containers, all ready steaming to
be eaten, in German territory. To their great credit be it said that the
party got back safely to the Australian trenches--save for one who is
missing and three who lie out there, face upwards.... Brave men.

There is only one time when that unearthly landscape returns to itself
again. I suppose men and women lived in those valleys once; French
farmers' girls tugged home at dusk up that ghostly roadway slow-footed,
reluctant cows; I dare say they even made love--French lads and
sweethearts--down some long obliterated path beside those willow stumps
where the German patrol sneaks nightly from shell-hole to shell-hole.
There comes an afternoo