ll their bloody talk the bastards
couldn't bring it down."

The hill with the lines upon it slopes steeply down to the valley of
the Ancre. Just where the lines come to the valley, the ground drops
abruptly, in a cliff or steep bank, twenty-five feet high, to the
road.

Our line on this slope covers the village of Hamel, which lies just
behind the line, along the road and on the hill-slopes above it. The
church and churchyard of Hamel, both utterly ruined, lie well up the
hill in such a position that they made good posts from which our
snipers could shoot across the river at men in the Schwaben Redoubt.
Crocuses, snowdrops, and a purple flower once planted on the graves of
the churchyard, but now escaped into the field, blossomed here in this
wintry spring, long before any other plant on the battlefield was in
bud.

Hamel in peace time may have contained forty houses, some shatters of
which still stand. There are a few red-brick walls, some frames of
wood from which the plaster has been blown, some gardens gone wild,
fruit trees unpruned and more or less ragged from fire, and an air of
desecration and desertion. In some of the ruins there are signs of
use. The lower windows are filled with sandbags, the lower stories
are strengthened with girders and baulks. From the main road in the
valley, a country track or road, muddy even for the Somme, leads up
the hill, through the heart of the village, past the church, towards
our old line and Auchonvillers.

Not much can be seen from the valley road in Hamel, for it is only a
few feet above the level of the river-bed, which is well grown with
timber not yet completely destroyed. The general view to the eastward
from this low-lying road is that of a lake, five hundred yards across,
in some wild land not yet settled. The lake is shallow, blind with
reeds, vivid with water-grass, and lively with moor-fowl. The trees
grow out of the water, or lie in it, just as they fell when they were
shot. On the whole, the trees just here, though chipped and knocked
about, have not suffered badly; they have the look of trees, and are
leafy in summer. Beyond the trees, on the other side of the marsh, is
the steep and high eastern bank of the Ancre, on which a battered
wood, called Thiepval Wood, stands like an army of black and haggard
rampikes. But for this stricken wood, the eastern bank of the Ancre is
a gentle, sloping hill, bare of trees. On the top of this hill is the
famous Schwaben