catch of helmets was
indeed quite considerable. Then I perceived on the road bank above
and marching parallel with this column, a double file of still muddier
Germans. Either they wore caps or went bare-headed. There were no
helmets among them. We do not rob our prisoners but--a helmet is a
weapon. Anyhow, it is an irresistible souvenir.

Now and then one sees afar off an ammunition dump, many hundreds of
stacks of shells--without their detonators as yet--being unloaded from
railway trucks, transferred from the broad gauge to the narrow gauge
line, or loaded onto motor trolleys. Now and then one crosses a railway
line. The railway lines run everywhere behind the British front, the
construction follows the advance day by day. They go up as fast as the
guns. One's guide remarks as the car bumps over the level
crossing, "That is one of Haig's railways." It is an aspect of the
Commander-in-Chief that has much impressed and pleased the men. And at
last we begin to enter the region of the former Allied trenches, we pass
the old German front line, we pass ruined houses, ruined fields, and
thick patches of clustering wooden crosses and boards where the dead
of the opening assaults lie. There are no more reapers now, there is no
more green upon the fields, there is no green anywhere, scarcely a tree
survives by the roadside, but only overthrown trunks and splintered
stumps; the fields are wildernesses of shell craters and coarse weeds,
the very woods are collections of blasted stems and stripped branches.
This absolutely ravaged and ruined battlefield country extends now along
the front of the Somme offensive for a depth of many miles; across it
the French and British camps and batteries creep forward, the stores,
the dumps, the railways creep forward, in their untiring, victorious
thrust against the German lines. Overhead hum and roar the aeroplanes,
away towards the enemy the humped, blue sausage-shaped kite balloons
brood thoughtfully, and from this point and that, guns, curiously
invisible until they speak, flash suddenly and strike their one short
hammer-blow of sound.

Then one sees an enemy shell drop among the little patch of trees on
the crest to the right, and kick up a great red-black mass of smoke and
dust. We see it, and then we hear the whine of its arrival and at last
the bang. The Germans are blind now, they have lost the air, they are
firing by guesswork and their knowledge of the abandoned territory.

"They