re to
them than the roads behind used to mean to us. But when I think how we
watered every yard of it with blood and sweat! Children might play there
now, if it didn't look so like the aftermath of an earthquake. I have a
sort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial.

The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter--so far, at least,
as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim scene
itself--held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads and
trampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them.
The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the
air--mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English
garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in
hour by hour.

"The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality
before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La
Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may
topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear
and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour,
till there is nothing left but mud and dust.

Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here
has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some
"hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil's
dough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see.
Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square
miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake
between the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison
there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering
of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and
torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the
countryside.

Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of
the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course.
"British!" says the officer in front--who was himself in the battle.
Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of the
German front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get our
bearings. There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, are
two trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, the
British and the enemy front lines. From that further line, at half-past
seven