with which he provides for
his comfort. For some weeks, the underground arrangements of Fricourt,
the stairs with wired treads, the bolting holes, the air and escape
shafts, the living rooms with electric light, the panelled walls,
covered with cretonnes of the smartest Berlin patterns, the neat bunks
and the signs of female visitors, were written of in the press, so
that some may think that Fricourt was better fitted than other places
on the line. It is not so. The work at Fricourt was well done, but it
was no better than that at other places, where a village with cellars
in it had to be converted into a fortress. Our men took Fricourt at
the beginning of the battle, in a fair state of preservation. Such
work was then new to our men, and this good example was made much of.

[Illustration: Looking at Fricourt and Fricourt Wood. Troops
bivouac for a Short Rest under Ground Sheets laced together]

In the valley below the village, in great, deep, and powerfully
revetted works, the enemy had built himself gun emplacements, so
weighted with timber balks that they collapsed soon after his men
ceased to attend them. The line of these great works ran (as so many
of his important lines have run) at the foot of a steep bank or
lynchet, so that at a little distance the parapet of the work merged
into the bank behind it and was almost invisible.

This line of guns ran about east and west across the neck of the
Fricourt Salient, which thrust still further south, across the little
valley and up the hill on the other side.

Our old line crosses the valley just to the east of the Fricourt
Station on the little railway which once ran in the valley past
Fricourt and Mametz to Montauban. It then crossed the fourth of the
roads from Albert, at Fricourt cemetery, which is a small, raised
forlorn garden of broken tombs at cross-roads, under the hill facing
Fricourt. Here our line began to go diagonally up the lower slopes of
the hill. The enemy line climbed it further to the east, round the
bulging snout of the hill, at a steep and difficult point above the
bank of a sunken road. Towards the top of the hill the lines
converged.

All the way of the hill, the enemy had the stronger position. It was
above us almost invisible and unguessable, except from the air, at the
top of a steep climb up a clay bank, which in wet weather makes bad
going even for the Somme; and though the lie of the ground made it
impossible for him to see much o