The Old Front Line | Page 7

remarkable, except that it is open, and gentle, and on a
generous scale. Looking north from our position at Hébuterne there is
the snout of the woodland salient; looking south there is the green
shallow shelving hollow or valley which made the No Man's Land for
rather more than a mile. It is just such a gentle waterless hollow, like a
dried-up river-bed, as one may see in several places in chalk country in
England, but it is unenclosed land, and therefore more open and
seemingly on a bigger scale than such a landscape would be in England,

where most fields are small and fenced. Our old front line runs where
the ground shelves or glides down into the valley; the enemy front line
runs along the gentle rise up from the valley. The lines face each other
across the slopes. To the south, the slope on which the enemy line
stands is very slight.
[Illustration: Artillery Transport crossing a Trench Bridge into the
Bapaume Road]
The impression given by this tract of land once held by the enemy is
one of graceful gentleness. The wood on the little spur, even now, has
something green about it. The village, once almost within the wood,
wrecked to shatters as it is, has still a charm of situation. In the distance
behind Gommecourt there is some ill-defined rising ground forming
gullies and ravines. On these rises are some dark clumps of woodland,
one of them called after the nightingales, which perhaps sing there this
year, in what is left of their home. There is nothing now to show that
this quiet landscape was one of the tragical places of this war.
The whole field of the Somme is chalk hill and downland, like similar
formations in England. It has about it, in every part of it, certain
features well known to every one who has ever travelled in a chalk
country. These features occur even in the gentle, rolling, and not
strongly marked sector near Hébuterne. Two are very noticeable, the
formation almost everywhere of those steep, regular banks or terraces,
which the French call remblais and our own farmers lynchets, and the
presence, in nearly all parts of the field, of roads sunken between two
such banks into a kind of narrow gully or ravine. It is said, that these
remblais or lynchets, which may be seen in English chalk countries, as
in the Dunstable Downs, in the Chiltern Hills, and in many parts of
Berkshire and Wiltshire, are made in each instance, in a short time, by
the ploughing away from the top and bottom of any difficult slope.
Where two slopes adjoin, such ploughing steepens the valley between
them into a gully, which, being always unsown, makes a track through
the crops when they are up. Sometimes, though less frequently, the
farmer ploughs away from a used track on quite flat land, and by doing
this on both sides of the track, he makes the track a causeway or

ridge-way, slightly raised above the adjoining fields. This type of raised
road or track can be seen in one or two parts of the battlefield (just
above Hamel and near Pozières for instance), but the hollow or sunken
road and the steep remblai or lynchet are everywhere. One may say that
no quarter of a mile of the whole field is without one or other of them.
The sunken roads are sometimes very deep. Many of our soldiers, on
seeing them, have thought that they were cuttings made, with great
labour, through the chalk, and that the remblais or lynchets were piled
up and smoothed for some unknown purpose by primitive man.
Probably it will be found, that in every case they are natural slopes
made sharper by cultivation. Two or three of these lynchets and sunken
roads cross the shallow valley of the No Man's Land near Hébuterne.
By the side of one of them, a line of Sixteen Poplars, now ruined, made
a landmark between the lines.
The line continues (with some slight eastward trendings, but without a
change in its gentle quiet) southwards from this point for about a mile
to a slight jut, or salient in the enemy line. This jut was known by our
men as the Point, and a very spiky point it was to handle. From near the
Point on our side of No Man's Land, a bank or lynchet, topped along its
edge with trees, runs southwards for about a mile. In four places, the
trees about this lynchet grow in clumps or copses, which our men
called after the four Evangelists, John, Luke, Mark, and Matthew. This
bank marks the old English front line between the Point and the Serre
Road a mile to the south of it. Behind this English line are