months of fire, and partly faintly
green from recovering grass. A little to the right or south, on this
bulk of spur, there are the stumps of trees and no grass at all,
nothing but upturned chalk and burnt earth. On the battlefield of the
Somme, these are the marks of a famous place.

The valley into which the slope descends is a broadish gentle opening
in the chalk hills, with a road running at right angles to the lines
of trenches at the bottom of it. As the road descends, the valley
tightens in, and just where the enemy line crosses it, it becomes a
narrow deep glen or gash, between high and steep banks of chalk. Well
within the enemy position and fully seven hundred yards from our line,
another such glen or gash runs into this glen, at right angles. At
this meeting place of the glens is or was the village of Beaumont
Hamel, which the enemy said could never be taken.

For the moment it need not be described; for it was not seen by many
of our men in the early stages of the battle. In fact our old line was
at least five hundred yards outside it. But all our line in the valley
here was opposed to the village defences, and the fighting at this
point was fierce and terrible, and there are some features in the No
Man's Land just outside the village which must be described. These
features run parallel with our line right down to the road in the
valley, and though they are not features of great tactical importance,
like the patch of summit above, where the craters are, or like the
windmill at Pozieres, they were the last things seen by many brave
Irish and Englishmen, and cannot be passed lightly by.

The features are a lane, fifty or sixty yards in front of our front
trench, and a remblai or lynchet fifty or sixty yards in front of the
lane.

The lane is a farmer's track leading from the road in the valley to
the road on the spur. It runs almost north and south, like the lines
of trenches, and is about five hundred yards long. From its start in
the valley-road to a point about two hundred yards up the spur it is
sunken below the level of the field on each side of it. At first the
sinking is slight, but it swiftly deepens as it goes up hill. For more
than a hundred yards it lies between banks twelve or fifteen feet
deep. After this part the banks die down into insignificance, so that
the road is nearly open. The deep part, which is like a very deep,
broad, natural trench, was known to our men as the Sunken Road. The
ba