. ----"; "Two unknown British heroes"; "An unknown British
soldier"; "A dead Fritz." That gentle slope to the Schwaben is covered
with such things.

Passing these things, by some lane through the wire and clambering
over the heaps of earth which were once the parapet, one enters the
Schwaben, where so much life was spent. As in so many places on this
old battlefield, the first thought is: "Why, they were in an eyrie
here; our fellows had no chance at all." There is no wonder, then,
that the approach is strewn with graves. The line stands at the top of
a smooth, open slope, commanding our old position and the Ancre
Valley. There is no cover of any kind upon the slope except the rims
of the shell-holes, which make rings of mud among the grass. Just
outside the highest point of the front line there is a little clump of
our graves. Just inside there is a still unshattered concrete fortlet,
built for the machine gun by which those men were killed.

All along that front trench of the Schwaben, lying on the parapet,
half buried in the mud, are the belts of machine guns, still full of
cartridges. There were many machine guns on that earthen wall last
year. When our men scrambled over the tumbled chalky line of old
sandbags, so plain just down the hill, and came into view on the
slope, running and stumbling in the hour of the attack, the machine
gunners in the fortress felt indeed that they were in an eyrie, and
that our fellows had no chance at all.

For the moment one thinks this, as the enemy gunners must have thought
it; then, looking up the hill at the inner works of the great fort,
the thought comes that it was not so happy a fate to have to hold this
eyrie. Sometimes, in winter storms, the Atlantic is heaved aloft and
tossed and tumbled under an evil heaven till all its wilderness is
hideous. This hill-top is exactly as though some such welter of water
had suddenly become mud. It is all heaped and tossed and tumbled as
though the earth there had been a cross-sea. In one place some great
earth wave of a trench has been bitten into and beaten back and turned
blind into an eddy by great pits and chasms and running heaps. Then in
another place, where the crown of the work once reared itself aloft
over the hill, the heaps of mud are all blurred and pounded together,
so that there is no design, no trace, no visible plan of any
fortress, only a mess of mud bedevilled and bewildered. All this mess
of heaps and hillocks is stru