in a kind of
order behind the burnt relics of a hedge, others dotted about at
random. All are burnt, blasted, and killed. One need only glance at
the hill on which they stand to see that it has been more burnt and
shell-smitten than most parts of the lines. It is as though the fight
here had been more than to the death, to beyond death, to the bones
and skeleton of the corpse which was yet unkillable. This is the site
of the little hill village of Thiepval, which once stood at a
cross-roads here among apple orchards and the trees of a park. It had
a church, just at the junction of the roads, and a fine seigneurial
chateau, in a garden, beside the church; otherwise it was a little
lonely mean place, built of brick and plaster on a great lonely heap
of chalk downland. It had no importance and no history before the war,
except that a Seigneur of Thiepval is mentioned as having once
attended a meeting at Amiens. It was of great military importance at
the time of the Battle of the Somme. In the old days it may have had a
beauty of position.

It is worth while to clamber up to Thiepval from our lines. The road
runs through the site of the village in a deep cutting, which may have
once been lovely. The road is reddish with the smashed bricks of the
village. Here and there in the mud are perhaps three courses of brick
where a house once stood, or some hideous hole bricked at the bottom
for the vault of a cellar. Blasted, dead, pitted stumps of trees, with
their bark in rags, grow here and there in a collection of vast holes,
ten feet deep and fifteen feet across, with filthy water in them.
There is nothing left of the church; a big reddish mound of brick,
that seems mainly powder round a core of cement, still marks where the
chateau stood. The chateau garden, the round village pond, the
pine-tree which was once a landmark there, are all blown out of
recognition.

The mud of the Somme, which will be remembered by our soldiers long
after they have forgotten the shelling, was worse at Thiepval than
elsewhere, or, at least, could not have been worse elsewhere. The road
through Thiepval was a bog, the village was a quagmire. Near the
chateau there were bits where one sank to the knee. In the great
battle for Thiepval, on the 26th of last September, one of our Tanks
charged an enemy trench here. It plunged and stuck fast and remained
in the mud, like a great animal stricken dead in its spring. It was
one of the sights of Thiepval