which
our men called after the four Evangelists, John, Luke, Mark, and
Matthew. This bank marks the old English front line between the Point
and the Serre Road a mile to the south of it. Behind this English
line are several small copses, on ground which very gently rises
towards the crest of the plateau a mile to the west. In front of most
of this part of our line, the ground rises towards the enemy trenches,
so that one can see little to the front, but the slope up. The No
Man's Land here is not green, but as full of shell-holes and the ruin
of battle as any piece of the field. Directly between Serre and the
Matthew Copse, where the lines cross a rough lump of ground, the enemy
parapet is whitish from the chalk. The whitish parapet makes the
skyline to observers in the English line. Over that parapet, some
English battalions made one of the most splendid charges of the
battle, in the heroic attack on Serre four hundred yards beyond.

To the right of our front at Matthew Copse the ground slopes southward
a little, past what may once have been a pond or quarry, but is now a
pit in the mud, to the Serre road. Here one can look up the muddy road
to the hamlet of Serre, where the wrecks of some brick buildings stand
in a clump of tree stumps, or half-right down a God-forgotten kind of
glen, blasted by fire to the look of a moor in hell. A few rampikes of
trees standing on one side of this glen give the place its name of Ten
Tree Alley. Immediately to the south of the Serre road, the ground
rises into one of the many big chalk spurs, which thrust from the main
Hebuterne plateau towards the Ancre Valley. The spur at this point
runs east and west, and the lines cross it from north and south. They
go up it side by side, a hundred and fifty yards apart, with a
greenish No Man's Land between them. The No Man's Land, as usual, is
the only part of all this chalk spur that is not burnt, gouged,
pocked, and pitted with shell fire. It is, however, enough marked by
the war to be bad going. When they are well up the spur, the lines
draw nearer, and at the highest point of the spur they converge in one
of the terrible places of the battlefield.

For months before the battle began, it was a question here, which side
should hold the highest point of the spur. Right at the top of the
spur there is one patch of ground, measuring, it may be, two hundred
yards each way, from which one can see a long way in every direction.
From this patch,