f our position, it was impossible for
us to see anything or his or to assault him. The hill is a big steep
chalk hill, with contours so laid upon it that not much of it can be
seen from below. By looking to the left from our trenches on its
western lower slopes one can see nothing of Fricourt, for the bulge of
the hill's snout covers it. One has a fair view of the old English
line on the smoothish big slope between Fricourt and Becourt, but
nothing of the enemy stronghold. One might have lived in those
trenches for nearly two years without seeing any enemy except the rain
and mud and lice.

Up at the top of the hill, there is an immense prospect over the
eastern half of the battlefield, and here, where the lines converge,
it was most necessary for us to have the crest and for the enemy to
keep us off it. The highest ground is well forward, on the snout, and
this point was the only part of the hill which the enemy strove to
keep. His line goes up the hill to the highest point, cuts off the
highest point, and at once turns eastward, so that his position on the
hill is just the northern slope and a narrow line of crest. It is as
though an army holding Fleet Street against an army on the Embankment
and in Cheapside should have seized Ludgate Hill to the top of the
steps of St. Paul's and left the body of the cathedral to its
opponent. The lines securing this important salient are of immense
strength and intricacy, with many great avenues of approach. The front
line is double across the greater part of the crest, and behind it is
a very deep, strong, trebly wired support line which is double at
important points.

[Illustration: The Sandbags at the Fricourt Salient]

Our old front line runs almost straight across the crest parallel with
the enemy front line, and distant from it from forty to one hundred
and fifty yards. The crest or highest ground is on both flanks of the
hill-top close to the enemy line. Between the lines at both these
points are the signs of a struggle which raged for weeks and months
for the possession of those lumps of hill, each, perhaps, two hundred
yards long, by fifty broad, by five high. Those fifteen feet of height
were bartered for with more than their own weight of sweat and blood;
the hill can never lose the marks of the struggle.

In those two patches of the hill the space between the lines is a
quarry of confluent craters, twenty or thirty yards deep, blown into
and under each other till