all.

* * * * *

From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield of the Somme:

1. In a north-westerly direction to Auchonvillers and Hebuterne.

2. In a northerly direction to Authuille and Hamel.

3. In a north-easterly direction to Pozieres.

4. In an easterly direction to Fricourt and Maricourt.

Between the second and the third of these the little river Ancre runs
down its broad, flat, well-wooded valley, much of which is a marsh
through which the river (and man) have forced more than one channel.
This river, which is a swift, clear, chalk stream, sometimes too deep
and swift to ford, cuts the English sector of the battlefield into two
nearly equal portions.

Following the first of the four roads, one passes the wooded village
of Martinsart, to the village of Auchonvillers, which lies among a
clump of trees upon a ridge or plateau top. The road dips here, but
soon rises again, and so, by a flat tableland, to the large village of
Hebuterne. Most of this road, with the exception of one little stretch
near Auchonvillers, is hidden by high ground from every part of the
battlefield. Men moving upon it cannot see the field.

Hebuterne, although close to the line and shelled daily and nightly
for more than two years, was never the object of an attack in force,
so that much of it remains. Many of its walls and parts of some of its
roofs still stand, the church tower is in fair order, and no one
walking in the streets can doubt that he is in a village. Before the
war it was a prosperous village; then, for more than two years, it
rang with the roar of battle and with the business of an army.
Presently the tide of the war ebbed away from it and left it deserted,
so that one may walk in it now, from end to end, without seeing a
human being. It is as though the place had been smitten by the plague.
Villages during the Black Death must have looked thus. One walks in
the village expecting at every turn to meet a survivor, but there is
none; the village is dead; the grass is growing in the street; the
bells are silent; the beasts are gone from the byre and the ghosts
from the church. Stealing about among the ruins and the gardens are
the cats of the village, who have eaten too much man to fear him, but
are now too wild to come to him. They creep about and eye him from
cover and look like evil spirits.

The second of the four roads passes out of Albert, crosses the railway
at a sharp turn,