to hold. It is difficult to range
artillery on it because of restricted vision, and the enemy's shells
aimed at it strike the trees and burst prematurely among his own men.
Other easy, relatively easy, places to hold are the dead spaces of
gullies and ravines. There you were out of fire and there you were not;
there you could hold and there you could not. Machine gun fire and shell
fire were the arbiters of topography more dependable than maps.

Why all the trees were not cut down by the continual bombardments of
both sides was past understanding. There was one lone tree on the
skyline near Longueval which I had watched for weeks. It still had a
limb, yes, the luxury of a limb, the last time that I saw it, pointing
with a kind of defiance in its immunity. Of course it had been struck
many times. Bits of steel were imbedded in its trunk; but only a direct
hit on the trunk will bring down a tree. Trees may be slashed and
whittled and nicked and gashed and still stand; and when villages have
been pulverized except for the timbering of the houses, a scarred shade
tree will remain.

Thus, trees in Delville Wood survived, naked sticks among fallen and
splintered trunks and upturned roots. How any man could have survived
was the puzzling thing. None could if he had remained there continuously
and exposed himself; but man is the most cunning of animals. With gas
mask and eye-protectors ready, steel helmet on his head and his faithful
spade to make himself a new hole whenever he moved, he managed the
incredible in self-protection. Earth piled back of a tree-trunk would
stop bullets and protect his body from shrapnel. There he lay and there
a German lay opposite him, except when attacks were being made.

Not getting the northern edge of the woods the British began sapping out
in trenches to the east toward Ginchy, where the map contours showed the
highest ground in that neighborhood. New lines of trenches kept
appearing on the map, often with group names such as Coffee Alley, Tea
Lane and Beer Street, perhaps. Out in the open along the irregular
plateau the shells were no more kindly, the bombing and the sapping no
less diligent all the way to the windmill, where the Australians were
playing the same kind of a game. With the actual summit gained at
certain points, these had to be held pending the taking of the whole, or
of enough to permit a wave of men to move forward in a general attack
without its line being broken by the r