zieres, a tattered wood was all
that marked the spot. Behind the brushwood you could still see in three
or four places the remains of a pink wall. Some way to the north-east of
the village, near the actual summit of the hill, was a low heap of
bleached terra-cotta. It was the stump of the Pozieres windmill.

Since then Pozieres has had our second bombardment, and a German
bombardment which lasted four days, in addition to the normal German
barrage across the village which has never really ceased. You can
actually see more of the buildings than before. That is to say, you can
see any brick or stone that stands. For the brushwood and tattered
branches which used to hide the road have gone; and all that remain are
charred tree stumps standing like a line of broken posts. The upland
around was once cultivated land, and it should be green with the weeds
of two years. It is as brown as the veldt. Over the whole face of the
country shells have ploughed up the land literally as with a gigantic
plough, so that there is more red and brown earth than green. From the
distance all the colour is given by these upturned crater edges, and the
country is wholly red.

[Illustration: A MAIN STREET OF POZIERES IN A QUIET INTERVAL DURING THE
FIGHT]

[Illustration: THE CHURCH, POZIERES]

But even this did not prepare one for the desolation of the place
itself. Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have
been cast for years outside some dry, derelict, God-forsaken up-country
township. Imagine some broken-down creek bed in the driest of our dry
central Australian districts, abandoned for a generation to the goats,
in which the hens have been scratching as long as men can remember. Then
take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving
thing. You must not even leave a spider. Put here, in evidence of some
old tumbled roof, a few roof beams and tiles sticking edgeways from the
ground, and the low faded ochre stump of the windmill peeping over the
top of the hill, and there you have Pozieres.

I know of nothing approaching that desolation. Perhaps it is that the
place is still in the thick of the fight. In most other ruins behind
battlefields that I have seen there are the signs of men again--perhaps
men who have visited the place like yourself. There is life, anyhow,
somewhere in the landscape. In this place there is no sign of life at
all. When you stand in Pozieres to-day, and are told that you w