n and
ascend a slope which gave neither dead ground nor cover to front or
flank. Low down the hill, running parallel with the road, is a little
lynchet, topped by a few old hawthorn bushes. All this bit of the old
front line was the scene of a most gallant attack by our men on the
1st of July. Those who care may see it in the official cinematograph
films of the Battle of the Somme.

[Illustration: Troops moving to the Front in the Dust of the
Summer Fighting]

Right at the top of the hill there is a dark enclosure of wood,
orchard, and plantation, with several fairly well preserved red-brick
buildings in it. This is the plateau-village of Auchonvillers. On the
slopes below it, a couple of hundred yards behind Jacob's Ladder,
there is a little round clump of trees. Both village and clump make
conspicuous landmarks. The clump was once the famous English
machine-gun post of the Bowery, from which our men could shoot down
the valley into Beaumont Hamel.

The English line goes up the big green hill, in trenches and saps of
reddish clay, to the plateau or tableland at the top. Right up on the
top, well behind our front line and close to one of our communication
trenches, there is a good big hawthorn bush, in which a magpie has
built her nest. This bush, which is strangely beautiful in the spring,
has given to the plateau the name of the Hawthorn Ridge.

Just where the opposing lines reach the top of the Ridge they both
bend from their main north and south direction towards the southeast,
and continue in that course for several miles. At the point or salient
of the bending, in the old enemy position, there is a crater of a mine
which the English sprang in the early morning of the 1st of July. This
is the crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was
supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is
not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but
none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is
like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one
hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and
twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish
tetter, like sulphur or the rancid fat on meat. The inside has rather
the look of meat, for it is reddish and all streaked and scabbed with
this pox and with discoloured chalk. A lot of it trickles and oozes
like sores discharging pus, and this liquid gathers in hole