You'll look down, too, on the villages dropped irregularly along its course. There's the low roof, the gable, the amorphous mass of greys and yellows topped by the pyramidal church spire rising grey slate to its summit. The number of villages you may see in thirty square miles of the Somme district is amazing. The whole Somme Valley is a mazed network of roads and streams, with groves and harvest-fields in the crowding interstices, the whole teeming with grey villages. This is the character of the country; and very lovely it is.
From your hilltop you'll see, perhaps, a bombing-school at play in the valley—the line of murderous, irregular bursts in their white, vapourish smoke, all forced into the extremity of unnaturalness by the deep colour of the wood behind.
In June the depth of the colour in this French country gave the sky itself a depth of colour not known in Australia. The cumulus resting on the sky-line would be arresting in its contrast with wood and pasture, and the blue of the gaps above it heightened too. Sometimes the days were clouded in the vault, but with a clear horizon; then you would get a kind of rich opalescence, the sunlight shut out above deflected and concentrated in the glowing horizon, its streaks of colour intensified fourfold by the depth of green in the landscape. Some such middle afternoons I never shall forget.
Upon the less frequented roads civilian traffic is frequent. It's mostly country-women in carts with pigs or oxen behind or with produce (or merchandise) for a village market. The village markets for a whole district are conducted by a sort of mobile column of vendors. They move (under a pass issued from the gendarmerie) from village to village in a species of caravan. Every village has a set market-day; the vendors move in agreement with it. They sell under booths on the pavements—sell fabrics, fruit, vegetables, fish, drapery, and clothing; and at some corner agreed upon they have the cattle market, with all the beasts tethered by a rope from horns to knee.
Approaching a village which is "holding" its market, you'll meet these beasts being driven in gangs, united in sixes and sevens by a rope connecting their horns. They are almost all conducted by women and boys. The boys are incredibly cruel to them, not only en route, but at the market-place.
It's not the women and girls conducting the market cattle who abuse them. They (and those in the market wagons) give you a smile and "Bon jour, m'sieur." There is a charm about this French usage of looking you in the eye and giving you a frank smile and a cheerful Good-day without ever having met you before.
You cannot go far without traversing some part of a military highroad—such is the frequency and the height of mobility. Especially is this so about those railheads adjacent to the line. Troops of cavalry, infantry, and artillery and horsed transport crowd French routes, even to the exclusion of the motor-lorry. For miles you may see nothing but a sea of yellow, bobbing, wash-basin trench-helmets. Unlovely they are, but useful. In such parts, too, the motor-'buses for rushing up reinforcements prevail. They come in long, swaying processions, filled with grinning warriors, who exchange repartee between themselves and the freight of other 'buses, and spend a lot of time in gnawing biscuit and jam. They gesticulate with these morsels.
The 'buses are just such as you see in the Strand, except for colour, which here is, of course, a dingy khaki. Above and within, when they are stuffed, they have an enormously useful carrying capacity.
At some stages of a route (and at very frequent stages) you pass a lorry-park, in the vicinity of which you are ordered to reduce the pace. There are whole battalions of lorries laagered and parked—miles of them—lining the main roads, lining the side-roads, lined in the fields; hordes of them radiating from the H.Q. at the main road. They are splashed and streaked and pied with colour, like Jacob's ewes, to baffle aircraft. They resemble, indeed, the streaked cruisers off Anzac. Some columns have other decorations. You'll pass, for instance, a Dickens convoy: the lorries are named from the novels—Sarah Gamp preceding Mr. Pickwick, with Little Nell panting in the rear; Bill Sykes, Scrooge, and the rest of them—with (in rare cases) crude attempts at illustration by portraiture.
The fleets of lorries give a sense of efficiency and mobility—even of dignity—as they stand ranked there.