the top of the hill is split apart. No man
can now tell which of all these mines were sunk by our men. The quarry
runs irregularly in heaps and hollows of chalk and red earth mingled
like flesh and blood. On our side of the pits the marks of our
occupation are plain. There in several places, as at La Boisselle and
on the Beaucourt spur, our men have built up the parapet of our old
front line by thousands of sandbags till it is a hill-top or cairn
from which they could see beyond. The sandbags have rotted and the
chalk and flints within have fallen partly through the rags, and
Nature has already begun to change those heaps to her own colours, but
they will be there for ever as the mark of our race. Such monuments
must be as lasting as Stonehenge. Neither the mines nor the guns of
the enemy could destroy them. From among them our soldiers peered
through the smoke of burning and explosions at the promised land which
the battle made ours.

From those heaps there is a wide view over that part of the field. To
the left one sees Albert, the wooded clump of Becourt, and a high
green spur which hides the Sausage Valley. To the front this green
spur runs to the higher ground from which the Fricourt spur thrusts.
On this higher ground, behind Fricourt and its wood, is a much bigger,
thicker, and better grown wood, about a mile and a half away; this is
the wood of Mametz. Some short distance to the left of this wood, very
plainly visible on the high, rather bare hill, is a clump of pollarded
trees near a few heaps of red brick. The trees were once the
shade-giving trees about the market-place of Contalmaison, a hamlet at
a cross-roads at this point. Behind these ruins the skyline is a kind
of ridge which runs in a straight line, broken in one place by a few
shatters of trees. These trees are the remains of the wood which once
grew outside the village of Pozieres. The ridge is the Albert-Bapaume
Road, here passing over the highest ground on its path.

Turning from these distant places and looking to the right, one sees,
just below, twelve hundred yards to the east of Fricourt, across the
valley at the foot of this hill of the salient, the end of an
irregular spur, on which are the shattered bricks of the village of
Mametz before mentioned.

To the north of Mametz the ground rises. From the eyrie of the salient
one can look over it and away to the north to big rolling chalk land,
most of it wooded. Mametz Wood is a dark expanse t