th the banks of great lynchets.
The lines cross the valley obliquely and run north and south along the
flank of this hill, keeping their old relative positions, the enemy
line well above our own, so that the approach to it is up a glacis.

[Illustration: Dug-outs and barbed wire in La Boisselle. Usna-Tara
Hill, with English Support Lines in Background. At Extreme Left is
the Albert-Bapaume Road]

As one climbs up along our old line here, the great flank of Ovillers
Hill is before one in a noble, bare sweep of grass, running up to the
enemy line. Something in the make of this hill, in its shape, or in
the way it catches the light, gives it a strangeness which other parts
of the battlefield have not. The rise between the lines of the
trenches is fully two hundred yards across, perhaps more. Nearly all
over it, in no sort of order, now singly, now in twos or threes, just
as the men fell, are the crosses of the graves of the men who were
killed in the attack there. Here and there among the little crosses is
one bigger than the rest, to some man specially loved or to the men of
some battalion. It is difficult to stand in the old English line from
which those men started without the feeling that the crosses are the
men alive, still going forward, as they went in the July morning a
year ago.

Just within the enemy line, three-quarters of the way up the hill,
there is a sort of small flat field about fifty yards across where the
enemy lost very heavily. They must have gathered there for some rush
and then been caught by our guns.

At the top of the hill the lines curve to the southeast, drawing
closer together. The crest of the hill, such as it is, was not
bitterly disputed here, for we could see all that we wished to see of
the hill from the eastern flank. Our line passes over the spur
slightly below it, the enemy line takes in as much of it as the enemy
needed. From it, he has a fair view of Albert town and of the country
to the east and west of it, the wooded hill of Becourt, and the hill
above Fricourt. From our line, we see his line and a few tree-tops.
From the eastern flank of the hill, our line gives a glimpse of the
site of the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, once one of the strong
places of the enemy, and now a few heaps of bricks, and one spike of
burnt ruin where the church stood.

Like most Picardy villages, Ovillers was compactly built of red brick
along a country road, with trees and orchards surrou