used, but the place was once an exceedingly hot corner.
In the old days, all the space between the two roads at the fork was
filled with the village or hamlet of La Boisselle, which, though a
tiny place, had once a church and perhaps a hundred inhabitants. The
enemy fortified the village till it was an exceedingly strong place.
We held a part of the village cemetery. Some of the broken crosses of
the graves still show among the chalk here.

[Illustration: Photograph showing the Scene of the Successful
British Advance at La Boisselle, taken from the British Front
Line]

To the left of the Roman Road, only a stone's throw from this ruined
graveyard, a part of our line is built up with now rotting sandbags
full of chalk, so that it looks like a mound of grey rocks. Opposite
the mound, perhaps a hundred yards up the hill, is another, much
bigger, irregular mound, of chalk that has become dirty, with some
relics of battered black wire at its base. The space between the two
mounds is now green with grass, though pitted with shell-holes, and
marked in many places with the crosses of graves. The space is the old
No Man's Land, and the graves are of men who started to charge across
that field on the 1st of July. The big grey mound is the outer wall or
casting of a mine thirty yards deep in the chalk and a hundred yards
across, which we sprang under the enemy line there on that summer
morning, just before our men went over.

La Boisselle, after being battered by us in our attack, was destroyed
by enemy fire after we had taken it, and then cleared by our men who
wished to use the roads. It offers no sight of any interest; but just
outside it, between the old lines, there is a stretch of spur, useful
for observation, for which both sides fought bitterly. For about 200
yards, the No Man's Land is a succession of pits in the chalk where
mines have been sprung. Chalk, wire, stakes, friends, and enemies seem
here to have been all blown to powder.

The lines cross this debated bit, and go across a small, ill-defined
bulk of chalk, known as Chapes Spur, on the top of which there is a
vast heap of dazzlingly white chalk, so bright that it is painful to
look at. Beyond it is the pit of a mine, evenly and cleanly blown,
thirty-five yards deep, and more than a hundred yards across, in the
pure chalk of the upland, as white as cherry blossom. This is the
finest, though not the biggest, mine in the battlefield. It was the
work of m