The Old Front Line

by John Masefield

It is a bolder, more regular spur than the others which thrust from this plateau. The top slopes so slightly as to be almost level, the two flanks are rather steep.

Right at the top of it, just where it springs from the plateau, much where the knuckle of the imagined hand would be, and perhaps five hundred yards east from our old sandbag barricade in Crucifix Valley, there is a redness in the battered earth and upon the chalk of the road. The redness is patchy over a good big stretch of this part of the spur, but it is all within the enemy lines and well above our own. Where the shattered hillside slopes towards our lines there are many remnants of trees, some of them fruit trees arranged in a kind of order behind the burnt relics of a hedge, others dotted about at random. All are burnt, blasted, and killed. One need only glance at the hill on which they stand to see that it has been more burnt and shell-smitten than most parts of the lines. It is as though the fight here had been more than to the death, to beyond death, to the bones and skeleton of the corpse which was yet unkillable. This is the site of the little hill village of Thiepval, which once stood at a cross-roads here among apple orchards and the trees of a park. It had a church, just at the junction of the roads, and a fine seigneurial château, in a garden, beside the church; otherwise it was a little lonely mean place, built of brick and plaster on a great lonely heap of chalk downland. It had no importance and no history before the war, except that a Seigneur of Thiepval is mentioned as having once attended a meeting at Amiens. It was of great military importance at the time of the Battle of the Somme. In the old days it may have had a beauty of position.

It is worth while to clamber up to Thiepval from our lines. The road runs through the site of the village in a deep cutting, which may have once been lovely. The road is reddish with the smashed bricks of the village. Here and there in the mud are perhaps three courses of brick where a house once stood, or some hideous hole bricked at the bottom for the vault of a cellar. Blasted, dead, pitted stumps of trees, with their bark in rags, grow here and there in a collection of vast holes, ten feet deep and fifteen feet across, with filthy water in them. There is nothing left of the church; a big reddish mound of brick, that seems mainly powder round a core of cement, still marks where the château stood. The château garden, the round village pond, the pine-tree which was once a landmark there, are all blown out of recognition.

The mud of the Somme, which will be remembered by our soldiers long after they have forgotten the shelling, was worse at Thiepval than elsewhere, or, at least, could not have been worse elsewhere. The road through Thiepval was a bog, the village was a quagmire. Near the château there were bits where one sank to the knee. In the great battle for Thiepval, on the 26th of last September, one of our Tanks charged an enemy trench here. It plunged and stuck fast and remained in the mud, like a great animal stricken dead in its spring. It was one of the sights of Thiepval during the winter, for it looked most splendid; afterwards, it was salved and went to fight again.

From this part of Thiepval one can look along the top of the Leipzig Spur, which begins here and thrusts to the south for a thousand yards.

There are two big enemy works on the Leipzig Spur: one, well to the south of the village, is (or was, for it is all blown out of shape) a six-angled star-shaped redoubt called the Wonder Work; the other, still further to the south, about a big, disused, and very evil-looking quarry, towards the end of the spur, is, or was, called the Leipzig Salient, or, by some people, the Hohenzollern, from the Hohenzollern Trench, which ran straight across the spur about halfway down the salient.

In these two fortresses the enemy had two strong, evil eyries, high above us. They look down upon our line, which runs along the side of the hill below them. Though, in the end, our guns blasted the enemy off the hill, our line along that slope was a costly one to hold, since fire upon it could be observed and directed from so many points—from the rear (above Hamel), from the left flank (on the Schwaben and near Thiepval), and from the hill itself. The hill is all skinned and scarred, and the trace of the great works can no longer be followed. At the top of the hill, in the middle of a filthy big pool, is a ruined enemy trench-mortar, sitting up like a swollen toad.

At the end of the spur the lines curve round to the east to shut in the hill. A grass-grown road crosses the lines here, goes up to the hill-top, and then along it. The slopes at this end of the hill are gentle, and from low down, where our lines are, it is a pleasant and graceful brae, where the larks never cease to sing and where you may always put up partridges and sometimes even a hare. It is a deserted hill at this time, but for the wild things. The No Man's Land is littered with the relics of a charge; for many brave Dorsetshire and Wiltshire men died in the rush up that slope. On the highest point of the enemy parapet, at the end of the hill, is a lonely white cross, which stands out like a banner planted by a conquerer. It marks the grave of an officer of the Wilts, who was killed there, among the ruin, in the July attack.

Below the lines, where the ground droops away toward the river, the oddly shaped, deeply-vallied Wood of Authuille begins. It makes a sort of socket of woodland so curved as to take the end of the spur.

It is a romantic and very lovely wood, pleasant with the noise of water and not badly damaged by the fighting. The trees are alive and leafy, the shrubs are pushing, and the spring flowers, wood anemones, violets, and the oxlip (which in this country takes the place of the primrose and the cowslip) flower beautifully among the shell-holes, rags, and old tins of war. But at the north-eastern end it runs out in a straggling spinney along the Leipzig's east flank, and this horn of wood is almost as badly shattered as if the shell fire upon it had been English. Here the enemy, fearing for his salient, kept up a terrible barrage. The trees are burnt, ragged, unbarked, topped, and cut off short, the trenches are blown in and jumbled, and the ground blasted and gouged.