the ground droops a little towards the English side
and stretches away fairly flat towards the enemy side, but one can see
far either way, and to have this power of seeing, both sides fought
desperately.

Until the beginning of the war, this spur of ground was corn-land,
like most of the battlefield. Unfenced country roads crossed it. It
was a quiet, lonely, prosperous ploughland, stretching for miles, up
and down, in great sweeping rolls and folds, like our own chalk
downlands. It had one feature common to all chalk countries; it was a
land of smooth expanses. Before the war, all this spur was a smooth
expanse, which passed in a sweep from the slope to the plateau, over
this crown of summit.

To-day, the whole of the summit (which is called the Redan Ridge), for
all its two hundred yards, is blown into pits and craters from twenty
to fifty feet deep, and sometimes fifty yards long. These pits and
ponds in rainy weather fill up with water, which pours from one pond
into another, so that the hill-top is loud with the noise of the
brooks. For many weeks, the armies fought for this patch of hill. It
was all mined, counter-mined, and re-mined, and at each explosion the
crater was fought for and lost and won. It cannot be said that either
side won that summit till the enemy was finally beaten from all that
field, for both sides conquered enough to see from. On the enemy side,
a fortification of heaped earth was made; on our side, castles were
built of sandbags filled with flint. These strongholds gave both
sides enough observation. The works face each other across the ponds.
The sandbags of the English works have now rotted, and flag about like
the rags of uniform or like withered grass. The flint and chalk laid
bare by their rotting look like the grey of weathered stone, so that,
at a little distance, the English works look old and noble, as though
they were the foundations of some castle long since fallen under Time.

To the right, that is to the southward, from these English castles
there is a slope of six hundred yards into a valley or gully. The
slope is not in any way remarkable or seems not to be, except that the
ruin of a road, now barely to be distinguished from the field, runs
across it. The opposing lines of trenches go down the slope, much as
usual, with the enemy line above on a slight natural glacis. Behind
this enemy line is the bulk of the spur, which is partly white from
up-blown chalk, partly burnt from