at everywhere
chunks of timber, horrible tangles of rusting wire, jagged fragments of
big shells, and a great number of unexploded shells are entangled in the
mess. Often this chaos is stained bright yellow by high explosives, and
across it run the twisting trenches and communication trenches eight,
ten, or twelve feet deep. These will become water pits and mud pits into
which beasts will fall. It is incredible that there should be crops from
any of this region of the push for many years to come. There is no shade
left; the roadside trees are splintered stumps with scarcely the spirit
to put forth a leaf; a few stunted thistles and weeds are the sole
proofs that life may still go on.

The villages of this wide battle region are not ruined; they are
obliterated. It is just possible to trace the roads in them, because
the roads have been cleared and repaired for the passing of the guns
and ammunition. Fricourt is a tangle of German dug-outs. One dug-out
in particular there promises to become a show place. It must be the
masterpiece of some genius for dug-outs; it is made as if its makers
enjoyed the job; it is like the work of some horrible badger among
the vestiges of what were pleasant human homes. You are taken down a
timbered staircase into its warren of rooms and passages; you are shown
the places under the craters of the great British shells, where the wood
splintered but did not come in. (But the arrival of those shells must
have been a stunning moment.) There are a series of ingenious bolting
shafts set with iron climbing bars. In this place German officers and
soldiers have lived continually for nearly two years. This war is,
indeed, a troglodytic propaganda. You come up at last at the far end
into what was once a cellar of a decent Frenchman's home.

But there are stranger subterranean refuges than that at Fricourt. At
Dompierre the German trenches skirted the cemetery, and they turned the
dead out of their vaults and made lurking places of the tombs. I walked
with M. Joseph Reinach about this place, picking our way carefully
amidst the mud holes and the wire, and watched the shells bursting away
over the receding battle line to the west. The wreckage of the graves
was Durereqsue. And here would be a fragment of marble angle and here
a split stone with an inscription. Splinters of coffins, rusty iron
crosses and the petals of tin flowers were trampled into the mud, amidst
the universal barbed wire. A little dis