CHAPTER IV
THE FOUGHTEN FIELD
I visited the fields of Beaumont-Hamel and Miraumont and Bapaume soon after they had been abandoned, in the pleasant sunshine of an April Sabbath afternoon. It was the abomination of desolation I saw—and felt. Of Beaumont-Hamel there was not a stone left standing, it was not until I had been told that a village once stood there that I began to distinguish the powdered rubble from its surroundings. There was difficulty in doing that, for not only were the buildings demolished, but their bricks crunched and crumbled.
As we approached the old line from ——, the degrees of demolition in the villages showed clearly how near they had stood to the field of fire, and how systematic had been the German bombardment. The remoter villages showed merely sporadic gaps in the walls—which might have been the result of accident rather than of purpose—or a church spire tottering. Nearer villages showed large areas containing not more than the skeletons of houses. The villages which had been in occupation—such as Beaumont-Hamel itself—had not one stone left upon another. The twisted wire straggled through them; the battered trenches wormed about.
We left the car at Miraumont and walked up the old road overlooking the village and Grandcourt Wood. They call it a road for the sake of topography. But did you ever see ring-barked trees standing in a morass?—that is it, with this difference: that these trees are branchless. You can conceive nothing more gaunt and desolate than that colony of splintered trunks standing down in the grassless valley of pools. The pools are shell-holes, so frequent that they have the aspect of a morass striated by thin ridges of black mud. The ridges are the lips of shell-holes.
Miraumont stands down the slope above the wood. It is less completely ruined than Beaumont-Hamel, but by that the more pathetic to look on. You can see what it has been: you cannot judge what Beaumont-Hamel may have been.
As far as you can see in any direction there is no blade of grass, though the spring has begun, and all the earth untouched by war is greening. Between —— and —— the loveliness of the early spring is upon the land; the primrose and the violet are starring the grass in the woods, and all the terraced slopes of the valleys are fair with the young crop. Here you see nothing but brown clay pocked by shell, the graceless grey zigzag of the ruined trench, the litter of deserted arms and equipment and smashed shelter, battered frames of village dwellings, and the limbless deformity of the splintered woods.
We walked up the ruined road beyond Miraumont. Both sides were thick with dug-outs. The road had been a kind of shelter between its low banks. I thought what the traffic on this road must have been when it was ours and the Germans were entrenched beyond it; how it would be shelled because it was low and naturally congested with British traffic; how the dug-outs would be peopled continuously by passers-by flinging themselves in for a momentary respite when the bursts were accurate.... The dug-outs were deep and littered with cast-off great-coats, tunics, scarves, boots; with jam-tins, beef-tins, rusted bayonets, clips of unused cartridge, battered rifles. It had been a road for the supply of ammunition to the front line. Its corners were choked with bombs, shell-case, and small-arm ammunition. In its excavations were dumps of barbed wire unused. You could infer all the busyness and congestion, the problem and the cursing of harassed and supercrowded transport in this road.
We reached the crest of the hill and struck to the left across the old field. This brought us upon a plateau. There had been more intense fighting here than on the slopes. There had been rain incessantly, too. The shell-holes were filled, and they were so frequent that the landscape resembled nothing so much as a coral reef at low tide. It was with the risk of slipping in that one made a way along the field at all. To have fallen in and taken a mouthful of that green liquid would have meant death. Those pools that were not green were red. Either colour implied only the degree of putrefaction of the corpses that lay beneath; but not always beneath. Here protruded a head, there a knee or a shoulder or a buttock; sometimes a gaunt hand alone outstretched from the stinking pool. The pools stunk; the ground stunk; the whole landscape smelt to heaven. My friend had brought, in his wisdom, some black Burmah cheroots. They were as strong as could be got, but they could not overwhelm the revolting stink of human putrefaction that rose all round. One asks what will it be when the spring is advanced and the pools are dry. One asks, too, when and how this land will be re-farmed. It is sown with live bomb and "dud" shell. One foresees the ploughing peasant having the soul blown out of him one spring morning. It will be long before the sword becomes the ploughshare. In the making of the via sacra, too, will there be many casualties.