seems, an amazing amount of human energy,
contrivance, and endurance. And what we see now is, of course, a second
or third stage. First of all there is the "clearing up" of the actual
battlefield. For this the work of the men now at work here--R.E.'s and
Labour battalions--is too skilled and too valuable. It is done by
fatigues and burying parties from the battalions in occupation of each
captured section. The dead are buried; the poor human fragments that
remain are covered with chlorate of lime; equipments of all kinds, the
litter of the battlefield, are brought back to the salvage dumps, there
to be sorted and sent back to the bases for repairs.

Then--or simultaneously--begins the work of the Engineers and the Labour
men. Enough ground has to be levelled and shell-holes filled up for the
driving through of new roads and railways, and the provision of places
where tents, huts, dumps, etc., are to stand. Roughly speaking, I see,
as I look round me, that a great deal of this work is here already far
advanced. There are hundreds of men, carts, and horses at work on the
roads, and everywhere one sees the signs of new railway lines, either of
the ordinary breadth, or of the narrow gauges needed for the advanced
carriage of food and ammunition. Here also is a great encampment of
Nissen huts; there fresh preparations for a food or an ammunition dump.

With one pair of eyes one can only see a fraction of what is in truth
going on. But the whole effect is one of vast and increasing industry,
of an intensity of determined effort, which thrills the mind hardly less
than the thought of the battle-line itself. "Yes, war _is_ work," writes
an officer who went through the Somme fighting, "much more than it is
fighting. This is one of the surprises that the New Army soldiers find
out here." Yet for the hope of the fighting moment men will go
cheerfully through any drudgery, in the long days before and after; and
when the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the wonder of
the world.

On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt, the shattered remnants of the
Mametz wood upon our left. More graveyards, carefully tended; spaces of
peace amid the universal movement. And always, on the southern horizon,
those clear lines of British trenches, whence sprang on July 1st, 1916,
the irresistible attack on Montauban and Mametz. Suddenly, over the
desolate ground to the west, we see a man hovering in mid-air,
descending on a parachute from a capti