The Old Front Line | Page 9

yards into a valley or gully. The slope is not in
any way remarkable or seems not to be, except that the ruin of a road,
now barely to be distinguished from the field, runs across it. The
opposing lines of trenches go down the slope, much as usual, with the
enemy line above on a slight natural glacis. Behind this enemy line is
the bulk of the spur, which is partly white from up-blown chalk, partly
burnt from months of fire, and partly faintly green from recovering
grass. A little to the right or south, on this bulk of spur, there are the
stumps of trees and no grass at all, nothing but upturned chalk and
burnt earth. On the battlefield of the Somme, these are the marks of a
famous place.
The valley into which the slope descends is a broadish gentle opening
in the chalk hills, with a road running at right angles to the lines of
trenches at the bottom of it. As the road descends, the valley tightens in,
and just where the enemy line crosses it, it becomes a narrow deep glen
or gash, between high and steep banks of chalk. Well within the enemy

position and fully seven hundred yards from our line, another such glen
or gash runs into this glen, at right angles. At this meeting place of the
glens is or was the village of Beaumont Hamel, which the enemy said
could never be taken.
For the moment it need not be described; for it was not seen by many
of our men in the early stages of the battle. In fact our old line was at
least five hundred yards outside it. But all our line in the valley here
was opposed to the village defences, and the fighting at this point was
fierce and terrible, and there are some features in the No Man's Land
just outside the village which must be described. These features run
parallel with our line right down to the road in the valley, and though
they are not features of great tactical importance, like the patch of
summit above, where the craters are, or like the windmill at Pozières,
they were the last things seen by many brave Irish and Englishmen, and
cannot be passed lightly by.
The features are a lane, fifty or sixty yards in front of our front trench,
and a remblai or lynchet fifty or sixty yards in front of the lane.
The lane is a farmer's track leading from the road in the valley to the
road on the spur. It runs almost north and south, like the lines of
trenches, and is about five hundred yards long. From its start in the
valley-road to a point about two hundred yards up the spur it is sunken
below the level of the field on each side of it. At first the sinking is
slight, but it swiftly deepens as it goes up hill. For more than a hundred
yards it lies between banks twelve or fifteen feet deep. After this part
the banks die down into insignificance, so that the road is nearly open.
The deep part, which is like a very deep, broad, natural trench, was
known to our men as the Sunken Road. The banks of this sunken part
are perpendicular. Until recently, they were grown over with a scrub of
dwarf beech, ash, and sturdy saplings, now mostly razed by fire. In the
road itself our men built up walls of sandbags to limit the effects of
enemy shell fire. From these defences steps cut in the chalk of the bank
lead to the field above, where there were machine-gun pits.
The field in front of the lane (where these pits were) is a fairly smooth
slope for about fifty yards. Then there is the lynchet or remblai, like a

steep cliff, from three to twelve feet high, hardly to be noticed from
above until the traveller is upon it. Below this lynchet is a fairly smooth
slope, so tilted that it slopes down to the right towards the valley road,
and slopes up to the front towards the enemy line. Looking straight to
the front from the Sunken Road our men saw no sudden dip down at
the lynchet, but a continuous grassy field, at first flat, then slowly rising
towards the enemy parapet. The line of the lynchet-top merges into the
slope behind it, so that it is not seen. The enemy line thrusts out in a
little salient here, so as to make the most of a little bulge of ground
which was once wooded and still has stumps. The bulge is now a heap
and ruin of burnt and tumbled mud and chalk. To reach it our men had
to run across the