ng and filthied over with broken bodies
and ruined gear. There is nothing whole, nor alive, nor clean, in all
its extent; it is a place of ruin and death, blown and blasted out of
any likeness to any work of man, and so smashed that there is no
shelter on it, save for the one machine gunner in his box. On all that
desolate hill our fire fell like rain for days and nights and weeks,
till the watchers in our line could see no hill at all, but a great,
vague, wreathing devil of darkness in which little sudden fires winked
and glimmered and disappeared.

Once in a lull of the firing a woman appeared upon the enemy parapet
and started to walk along it. Our men held their fire and watched her.
She walked steadily along the whole front of the Schwaben and then
jumped down into her trench. Many thought at the time that she was a
man masquerading for a bet, but long afterwards, when our men took the
Schwaben, they found her lying in the ruins dead. They buried her
there, up on the top of the hill. God alone knows who she was and what
she was doing there.

Looking back across the Ancre from the Schwaben the hill of the right
bank of the river is clear from the woods near Mesnil to Beaucourt.
All along that graceful chalk hill our communication trenches thrust
up like long white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers on a reef.
At right angles to these long white lines are black streaks which mark
the enemy's successive front lines. The later ones are visibly more
ragged than those near our old line.

There are few more lonely places than that scene of old battles. One
may stand on the Schwaben for many days together and look west over
the moor, or east over the wilderness, without seeing any sign of
human life, save perhaps some solitary guarding a dump of stores.

The hill on which the Schwaben is built is like a great thumb laid
down beside the Ancre River. There is a little valley on its eastern
side exactly like the space between a great thumb and a great
forefinger. It is called Crucifix Valley, from an iron Calvary that
stood in it in the early days of the war. It must once have been a
lovely and romantic glen, strangely beautiful throughout. Even now its
lower reach between a steep bank of scrub and Thiepval Wood is as
lovely as a place can be after the passing of a cyclone. Its upper
reach, which makes the eastern boundary of the Schwaben, is as ghastly
a scene of smash as the world can show. It is nothing but a colle