halk
country. These features occur even in the gentle, rolling, and not
strongly marked sector near Hebuterne. Two are very noticeable, the
formation almost everywhere of those steep, regular banks or terraces,
which the French call remblais and our own farmers lynchets, and the
presence, in nearly all parts of the field, of roads sunken between
two such banks into a kind of narrow gully or ravine. It is said, that
these remblais or lynchets, which may be seen in English chalk
countries, as in the Dunstable Downs, in the Chiltern Hills, and in
many parts of Berkshire and Wiltshire, are made in each instance, in a
short time, by the ploughing away from the top and bottom of any
difficult slope. Where two slopes adjoin, such ploughing steepens the
valley between them into a gully, which, being always unsown, makes a
track through the crops when they are up. Sometimes, though less
frequently, the farmer ploughs away from a used track on quite flat
land, and by doing this on both sides of the track, he makes the track
a causeway or ridge-way, slightly raised above the adjoining fields.
This type of raised road or track can be seen in one or two parts of
the battlefield (just above Hamel and near Pozieres for instance), but
the hollow or sunken road and the steep remblai or lynchet are
everywhere. One may say that no quarter of a mile of the whole field
is without one or other of them. The sunken roads are sometimes very
deep. Many of our soldiers, on seeing them, have thought that they
were cuttings made, with great labour, through the chalk, and that the
remblais or lynchets were piled up and smoothed for some unknown
purpose by primitive man. Probably it will be found, that in every
case they are natural slopes made sharper by cultivation. Two or three
of these lynchets and sunken roads cross the shallow valley of the No
Man's Land near Hebuterne. By the side of one of them, a line of
Sixteen Poplars, now ruined, made a landmark between the lines.

The line continues (with some slight eastward trendings, but without a
change in its gentle quiet) southwards from this point for about a
mile to a slight jut, or salient in the enemy line. This jut was known
by our men as the Point, and a very spiky point it was to handle. From
near the Point on our side of No Man's Land, a bank or lynchet, topped
along its edge with trees, runs southwards for about a mile. In four
places, the trees about this lynchet grow in clumps or copses,