The Old Front Line | Page 7

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 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