in the foreground, the area of
vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of
shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle
and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting
alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the
black bursts of the German high explosives hammering Mametz Wood, as if
in revenge for its loss, seemed uglier and more murderous than usual;
the light smoke of shrapnel had a softer, more lingering quality;
soldiers were visible distinctly at a great distance in their comings
and goings; the water carts carrying water up to the first line were a
kind of pilgrim circuit riders of that thirsty world of deadly strife; a
file of infantry winding up the slope at regular intervals were
silhouettes as like as beads on a string. The whole suggested a hill of
ants which had turned their habits of industry against an invader of
their homes in the earth, and the columns of motor trucks and caissons
ever flowing from all directions were as a tide, which halted at the
foot of the slope and then flowed back.

There were shell-bursts wherever you looked, with your attention drawn
to Contalmaison as it would be to a gathering crowd in the thick of city
traffic. All the steel throats in clumps of woods, under cover of road
embankments, in gullies and on the reverse side of slopes, were
speaking. The guns were giving to Contalmaison all they had to give and
the remaining walls of the chateau disappeared in a fog like a fishing
smack off the Grand Banks. Super-refined, man-directed hell was making
sportive chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming breath cut
by columns of black smoke from the H.E.'s and crowned with flashes of
shrapnel; and under the sun's rays the gases from the powder made
prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot with the tints of the
rainbow.

Submerging a simple farming hamlet in this kind of a tempest was only
part of the plan of the gunners, who cut a pattern of fire elsewhere in
keeping with the patterns of the German trenches, placing a curtain of
fire behind the town and another on the edge, and at other points not a
curtain but steady hose-streams of fire. Answering German shells
revealed which of the chalky scars on the slope was the British
first-line trench, and from this, as steam from a locomotive runs in a
flying plume along the crest of a railway cutting, rose a billowing wall
of smok