The Old Front Line | Page 8

several small
copses, on ground which very gently rises towards the crest of the
plateau a mile to the west. In front of most of this part of our line, the
ground rises towards the enemy trenches, so that one can see little to
the front, but the slope up. The No Man's Land here is not green, but as
full of shell-holes and the ruin of battle as any piece of the field.
Directly between Serre and the Matthew Copse, where the lines cross a
rough lump of ground, the enemy parapet is whitish from the chalk.
The whitish parapet makes the skyline to observers in the English line.
Over that parapet, some English battalions made one of the most
splendid charges of the battle, in the heroic attack on Serre four
hundred yards beyond.

To the right of our front at Matthew Copse the ground slopes
southward a little, past what may once have been a pond or quarry, but
is now a pit in the mud, to the Serre road. Here one can look up the
muddy road to the hamlet of Serre, where the wrecks of some brick
buildings stand in a clump of tree stumps, or half-right down a
God-forgotten kind of glen, blasted by fire to the look of a moor in hell.
A few rampikes of trees standing on one side of this glen give the place
its name of Ten Tree Alley. Immediately to the south of the Serre road,
the ground rises into one of the many big chalk spurs, which thrust
from the main Hébuterne plateau towards the Ancre Valley. The spur at
this point runs east and west, and the lines cross it from north and south.
They go up it side by side, a hundred and fifty yards apart, with a
greenish No Man's Land between them. The No Man's Land, as usual,
is the only part of all this chalk spur that is not burnt, gouged, pocked,
and pitted with shell fire. It is, however, enough marked by the war to
be bad going. When they are well up the spur, the lines draw nearer,
and at the highest point of the spur they converge in one of the terrible
places of the battlefield.
For months before the battle began, it was a question here, which side
should hold the highest point of the spur. Right at the top of the spur
there is one patch of ground, measuring, it may be, two hundred yards
each way, from which one can see a long way in every direction. From
this patch, the ground droops a little towards the English side and
stretches away fairly flat towards the enemy side, but one can see far
either way, and to have this power of seeing, both sides fought
desperately.
Until the beginning of the war, this spur of ground was corn-land, like
most of the battlefield. Unfenced country roads crossed it. It was a
quiet, lonely, prosperous ploughland, stretching for miles, up and down,
in great sweeping rolls and folds, like our own chalk downlands. It had
one feature common to all chalk countries; it was a land of smooth
expanses. Before the war, all this spur was a smooth expanse, which
passed in a sweep from the slope to the plateau, over this crown of
summit.

To-day, the whole of the summit (which is called the Redan Ridge), for
all its two hundred yards, is blown into pits and craters from twenty to
fifty feet deep, and sometimes fifty yards long. These pits and ponds in
rainy weather fill up with water, which pours from one pond into
another, so that the hill-top is loud with the noise of the brooks. For
many weeks, the armies fought for this patch of hill. It was all mined,
counter-mined, and re-mined, and at each explosion the crater was
fought for and lost and won. It cannot be said that either side won that
summit till the enemy was finally beaten from all that field, for both
sides conquered enough to see from. On the enemy side, a fortification
of heaped earth was made; on our side, castles were built of sandbags
filled with flint. These strongholds gave both sides enough observation.
The works face each other across the ponds. The sandbags of the
English works have now rotted, and flag about like the rags of uniform
or like withered grass. The flint and chalk laid bare by their rotting look
like the grey of weathered stone, so that, at a little distance, the English
works look old and noble, as though they were the foundations of some
castle long since fallen under Time.
To the right, that is to the southward, from these English castles there is
a slope of six hundred