son, the lumping rolls of chalk hill rising
up on each side of this valley have a menace and a horror about them.
One sees little of the enemy position from the English line. It is now
nothing but a track of black wire in front of some burnt and battered
heapings of the ground, upon which the grass and the flowers have only
now begun to push. At the beginning of the battle it must have been
greener and fresher, for then the fire of hell had not come upon it;
but even then, even in the summer day, that dent in the chalk leading
to the Y Ravine must have seemed a threatening and forbidding place.

Our line goes along the top of the ridge here, at a good distance from
the enemy line. It is dug on the brow of the plateau in reddish earth
on the top of chalk. It is now much as our men left it for the last
time. The trench-ladders by which they left it are still in place in
the bays of the trenches. All the outer, or jumping-off, trenches, are
much destroyed by enemy shell fire, which was very heavy here from
both sides of the Ancre River. A quarter of a mile to the southeast
of the Y Ravine the line comes within sight of the great gap which
cuts the battlefield in two. This gap is the valley of the Ancre
River, which runs here beneath great spurs of chalk, as the Thames
runs at Goring and Pangbourne. On the lonely hill, where this first
comes plainly into view, as one travels south along the line, there
used to be two bodies of English soldiers, buried once, and then
unburied by the rain. They lay in the No Man's Land, outside the
English wire, in what was then one of the loneliest places in the
field. The ruin of war lay all round them.

There are many English graves (marked, then, hurriedly, by the man's
rifle thrust into the ground) in that piece of the line. On a windy
day, these rifles shook in the wind as the bayonets bent to the blast.
The field testaments of both men lay open beside them in the mud. The
rain and the mud together had nearly destroyed the little books, but
in each case it was possible to read one text. In both cases, the text
which remained, read with a strange irony. The one book, beside a
splendid youth, cut off in his promise, was open at a text which ran,
"And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and mighty
in word and in deed." The other book, beside one who had been killed
in an attack which did not succeed at the moment, but which led to the
falling back of the enemy nation from