It is a romantic and very lovely wood, pleasant with the noise of
water and not badly damaged by the fighting. The trees are alive and
leafy, the shrubs are pushing, and the spring flowers, wood anemones,
violets, and the oxlip (which in this country takes the place of the
primrose and the cowslip) flower beautifully among the shell-holes,
rags, and old tins of war. But at the north-eastern end it runs out in
a straggling spinney along the Leipzig's east flank, and this horn of
wood is almost as badly shattered as if the shell fire upon it had
been English. Here the enemy, fearing for his salient, kept up a
terrible barrage. The trees are burnt, ragged, unbarked, topped, and
cut off short, the trenches are blown in and jumbled, and the ground
blasted and gouged.

Standing in the old English front line just to the north of Authuille
Wood, one sees the usual slow gradual grassy rise to the dark enemy
wire. Mesnil stands out among its trees to the left; to the right is
this shattered stretch of wood, with a valley beyond it, and a rather
big, steep, green hill topped by a few trees beyond the valley. The
jut of the Leipzig shuts out the view to the flanks, so that one can
see little more than this.

The Leipzig, itself, like the Schwaben, is a hawk's nest or eyrie. Up
there one can look down by Authuille Wood to Albert church and
chimneys, the uplands of the Somme, the Amiens road, down which the
enemy marched in triumph and afterwards retreated in a hurry, and the
fair fields that were to have been the booty of this war. Away to the
left of this is the wooded clump of Becourt, and, beyond it, One Tree
Hill with its forlorn mound, like the burial place of a King. On the
right flank is the Ancre Valley, with the English position round Hamel
like an open book under the eye; on the left flank is the rather big,
steep, green hill, topped by a few trees, before mentioned. These trees
grow in and about what was once the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle.
The hill does not seem to have a name; it may be called here Middle
Finger Hill or Ovillers Hill.

Like the Schwaben and the Leipzig Hills this hill thrusts out from the
knuckle of the big chalk plateau to the north of it like the finger of
a hand, in this case the middle finger. It is longer and less
regularly defined than the Leipzig Hill; because instead of ending, it
merges into other hills not quite so high. The valley which parts it
from the Leipzig is steeply sided, wi