One of the grave-diggers offers his red wrist to be felt.
"Yers I know," says the sergeant-major indignantly. "Moy zig-zag las' night. But n-no zig-zag to-day."
They offer him their glasses—apparently of beer. He sips one and then drains it, and then drains the other one too.
"Now com' on, com' on into cemetery and work with the others," he continues, wiping his moustache. The Falstaffs try to rise, but fall back into their seats laughing. Finally the sergeant-major hits one a heavy crack on the head with his stick and pulls his red right ear out like india-rubber to double length, tweaks the other Falstaff by the nose, and pulls them both up, and shakes them.
"Na then," says he. "Quick March to the cemetery!" And they go.
How the dead would have laughed to see this scene! How living are the living!
The way is toward Flers and toward Ginchy. In a grey haze of autumn sunshine the battlefields stretch like a sea; green waves to the limit of eyes' view. And there are bits of worn-down woods like those mysterious wrecks of forest which come into view upon some shores when a neap-tide leaves them bare.
Ten years ago the whole land was a fair pleasaunce. Ten years hence it will doubtless be tamed again if not so fair. The sinistrés of the Somme are doing a marvellous work already, filling in the pits, levelling with their spades, and ploughing up the whole with their little petrol-ploughs. The shell-splashed approaches to the line can with industry be recovered. And the Frenchman when working for himself has what seems a slavish love of toil. He does his real worship bending over la France and he will work on to the end. He has to do a hundred times what he has already done—and he will do it. A hundredth part of the battle area of the Somme has been recovered, and on the ninety-nine parts grow all that naturally would arise if man died out upon this fertile world. The stinging-nettles are higher than a man's head and rise on full fleshy stalks, and they are thick like a wall. They grow from the caked black mud, from sunken equipment and horses and men and all the jetsam of war. They can make no-man's land strange and terrible yet, though not so terrible if still impassable. You see gleaming above the green main-flood of nettle a white Ionic cross shining afar and make it your landmark. You reach it as a swimmer coming from some ship to a white buoy on the sea, and find it to be the monument to the 47th Londons in memory of the taking of Eaucourt. And yonder is a conventional scribble on the moor—the ruins of Eaucourt. You come out on to a limy plank road, listening to distant explosions from the returned peasants making sauter les abris with dynamite, and then the eye rests on an ugly hump of weed-grown rock, a strange uprising from the centre of a large tableland. It is the Butte of Warlencourt, for the possession and retention of which what quantities of blood were shed, the famous Butte which you can walk up now as you would walk upstairs. Here stand wooden monuments to the 6th, 8th and 9th Durham Light Infantry—to the 2nd South African Infantry, and also to Sachs Inf. Regt. 159 who held the Butte against all comers in 1916 and recaptured it on the 25th March 1918, and the thoughtful Germans have given their monument a concrete base. From the top of the Butte there is a complete circle of view, and one sees a light railway going from it towards Eaucourt lined with dead desperate trees, one sees once more as it were waves of the sea on leagues of no-man's land, black ruins of woods, wrecks of villages—a wonderful standing point and vantage ground in the great Somme scene.