It is raining. Bogs, where the grass is already sprouting between the yellow pools, lie in the low places, like those cold lakes that fill the tall craters of Auvergne. Here yawns an opening, propped with beams, and three-quarters covered with the continually sliding earth. A sap. There again stands a notice, posted too late: "Poison!—Danger!"
Wreckage of every kind—rusty tins, heaps of cases bursting with rotten bags of powder and saltpetre, litter these strange craters. And what an amazing efflorescence of old iron, grenades and bits of shell!
In this Land of Mines we find a symbol of the savage splendour of this war. All these carefully prepared horrors, all these apocalyptic monstrosities, for the conquest of an acre or two! One can understand why King George came here, as a wooden tablet records, to the edge of this fabulous, petrified tide race, to salute the victorious courage of the Empire's soldiers.
Beast-like around us roar the guns. Lightnings flicker through the haze. A line of skeleton trees jags the horizon—Delville Wood. To the West vague clouds of smoke from camp fires, vague heaps of bricks. This is all that we can call Mametz and Montauban. A sausage balloon rises jerkily—over there, towards Maricourt. One cannot speak these names with a steady voice. They are the foretaste of Freedom. And it is here, in the Land of Mines, that the foundations of Victory have been laid.
[CHAPTER V.]
THE MENACE OF THE GOLDEN VIRGIN.
I have now to tell of the reconquered ground, and I own that the description, which I cannot claim to have invented, more nearly than any other suggests the reality. Indeed, there are not in the French language, nor can there be in any other, for the imagination cannot conceive such things, any words that can give a just idea of so much wretchedness and desolation.
So I have thought a score of times, while, during these last days, I have been making my way over the plateau which lies between the Ancre and the Somme, a quite narrow section of the battle front. What would be my difficulty had I to describe the land that the French have retaken!