"With my Hey down, down,
With my Ho down, down,
Hey down,
Ho down,
Derry, Derry down,
All among the leaves so green, O."
Later, perhaps, if the night was fine, the Major would retire to the garden and play the flute. This was a serious moment—a great hush was felt, nobody dared to move; but he really didn't play badly. And old Hale would tell stories which no one could understand, and de Maratray would play ping-pong with extraordinary agility. It would all have been great fun if people had not been killing each other so near. Why, during that time, the Boche did not bomb Amiens, I cannot understand, it was thick every week-end with the British Army. One could hardly jamb oneself through the crowd in the Place Gambetta or up the Rue des Trois Cailloux. It was a struggling mass of khaki, bumping over the uneven cobblestones. What streets they were! I remember walking back from dinner one night with a Major, the agricultural expert of the Somme, and he said, "Don't you think the pavement is very hostile to-night?"
I shall never forget my first sight of the Somme battlefields. It was snowing fast, but the ground was not covered, and there was this endless waste of mud, holes and water. Nothing but mud, water, crosses and broken Tanks; miles and miles of it, horrible and terrible, but with a noble dignity of its own, and, running through it, the great artery, the Albert-Bapaume Road, with its endless stream of men, guns, food lorries, mules and cars, all pressing along with apparently unceasing energy towards the front. Past all the little crosses where their comrades had fallen, nothing daunted, they pressed on towards the Hell that awaited them on the far side of Bapaume. The mud, the cold, the noise, the misery, and perhaps death;—on they went, plodding through the mud, those wonderful men, perhaps singing one of their cheer-making songs, such as:—
"I want to go home.
I want to go home.
I don't want to go to the trenches no more,
Where the Whizz-bangs and Johnsons do rattle and roar.
Take me right over the sea,
Where the Allemande can't bayonet me.
Oh, my!
I don't want to die,
I want to go home."
V. Warwickshires entering Péronne.
How did they do it? "I want to go home."—Does anyone realise what those words must have meant to them then? I believe I do now—a little bit. Even I, from my back, looking-on position, sometimes felt the terrible fear, the longing to get away. What must they have felt? "From battle, murder and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us."
On up the hill past the mines to Pozières. An Army railway was then running through Pozières, and the station was marked by a big wooden sign painted black and white, like you see at any country station in England, with POZIÈRES in large Roman letters, but that's all there was of Pozières except a little red in the mud. I remember later, at the R.F.C. H.Q., Maurice Baring showed me a series of air-photographs of Pozières as it was in 1914, with its peaceful little streets and rows of trees. What a contrast to the Pozières as it was in 1917—MUD. Further on, the Butte stood out on the right, a heap of chalky mud, not a blade of grass round it then—nothing but mud, with a white cross on the top. On the left, the Crown Prince's dug-out and Gibraltar—I suppose these have gone now—and Le Sars and Grévillers, at that time General Birdwood's H.Q., where the church had been knocked into a fine shape. I tried to draw it, but was much put off by air fighting. It seemed a favourite spot for this.
Bapaume must always have been a dismal place, like Albert, but Péronne must have been lovely, looking up from the water; and the main Place must have been most imposing, but then it was very sad. The Boche had only left it about three weeks, and it had not been "cleaned up." But the real terribleness of the Somme was not in the towns or on the roads. One felt it as one wandered over the old battlefields of La Boisselle, Courcelette, Thiepval, Grandcourt, Miraumont, Beaumont-Hamel, Bazentin-le-Grand and Bazentin-le-Petit—the whole country practically untouched since the great day when the Boche was pushed back and it was left in peace once more.