A few more minutes, and we are through the town, moving slowly along the Albert-Bapaume road, that famous road which will be a pilgrims' way for generations to come.
"To other folk," writes an officer quoted by Mr. Buchan in his Battle of the Somme, "and on the maps, one place seems just like another, I suppose; but to us—La Boisselle and Ovillers—my hat!"
To walk about in those hells! I went along the "sunken road" all the way to Contalmaison. Talk about sacred ground! The new troops coming up now go barging across in the most light-hearted way. It means no more to them than the roads behind used to mean to us. But when I think how we watered every yard of it with blood and sweat! Children might play there now, if it didn't look so like the aftermath of an earthquake. I have a sort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial.
The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter—so far, at least, as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim scene itself—held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads and trampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them. The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the air—mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in hour by hour.
"The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour, till there is nothing left but mud and dust.
Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some "hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil's dough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see. Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake between the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the countryside.
Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course. "British!" says the officer in front—who was himself in the battle. Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of the German front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get our bearings. There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, are two trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, the British and the enemy front lines. From that further line, at half-past seven on the summer morning for ever blazoned in the annals of our people, the British Army went over the parapet, to gather in the victory prepared for it by the deadly strength and accuracy of British guns; made possible in its turn by the labour in far-off England of millions of workers—men and women—on the lathes and in the filling factories of these islands.
We move on up the road. Now we are among what remains of the trenches and dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's despatch. "During nearly two years' preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render these defences impregnable," says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on to describe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters, and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the winter has made us at home—on paper—so familiar. "The numerous woods and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses." The deep cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements—everything that the best brains of the German Army could devise for our destruction—had been lavished on the German lines. And behind the first line was a second—and behind the second line a third. And now here we stand in the midst of what was once so vast a system. What remains of it—and of all the workings of the German mind that devised it? We leave the motor and go to look into the dug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germans flung themselves at the approach of our men after the bombardment, and then Captain F. guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and we sink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over what once was Ovillers, northward towards Thiépval, and the slopes behind which runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and naked land, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of some of the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard by yard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain, mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Allies might live.
"There were no stragglers, none!" Let us never forget that cry of exultant amazement wrung from the lips of an eye-witness, who saw the young untried troops go over the parapet in the July dawn and disappear into the hell beyond. And there in the packed graveyards that dot these slopes lie thousands of them in immortal sleep; and as the Greeks in after days knew no nobler oath than that which pledged a man by those who fell at Marathon, so may the memory of those who fell here burn ever in the heart of England, a stern and consecrating force.
"Life is but the pebble sunk,
Deeds the circle growing!"