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With ripening grain and sweet-smelling harvests of clover and hay in the background and weeds and wild grass in the foreground, the area of vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction.
No weary legs hamper him; he does not have to crawl over the dead or hide in shell-craters or stand up to his knees in mire. He is the pampered aristocrat of war, the golden youth of adventure. He leaves a comfortable bed, with bath, a good breakfast, the comradeship of a pleasant mess, the care of servants, to mount his steed. When he returns he has only to step out of his seat.
Trenches out of the question, it became a war among shell-craters. Here a soldier ensconced himself with rifle and bombs or a machine gunner deepened the hole with his spade for the gun. This was "scrapping" to the Australians' taste.
The time was winter, when chill water filled the shell-craters and the soil oozed out of sandbags and the mist was a cold, wet poultice. Men bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate better suited to the Englishman or the German than to the Canadian. There could be no dugouts. Lift a spade of earth below the earth level and it became a puddle.
On the other side of the valley was a cut in the earth, a ditch, the British first-line trench, which was unoccupied, so far as I could see. Beyond lay the old No Man's Land where grass and weeds had grown wild for two seasons, hiding the numerous shell-craters and the remains of the dead from the British charge of July 1st which had been repulsed.
"We entrained at Savigny," wrote a man of one of these regiments, "and at once knew our destination. It was our old blood-bath the Somme." In many letters this phrase was used. The Somme was called the "Bath of Blood" by the German troops who waded across its shell-craters and in the ditches which were heaped with their dead.
They brought their guns above the shell-craters of their destroyed trenches under our barrage and served them. They ran forward even into No Man's Land, and planted their machine-guns there, and swept down our men as they charged. Over their heads the German gunners flung a frightful barrage, plowing gaps in the ranks of our men.
Our men had advanced from Wedge Wood, and I watched them from a trench just south of this, to which I had gone at a great pace over shell-craters and broken wire, with a young observing officer who had been detailed to report back to the guns. It was sheer suicide.
Their officers out in shell-craters under curtains of fire joked one another with an aristocratic, genial sangfroid, the slender man who had a nine-inch crater boasting of his luck over the thickset man who tried to accommodate himself to a five-inch, while a colonel blew his hunting-horn in the charge, which the Guards made in a manner worthy of tradition.
He had never been in the cavalry, and any squadron knew well what he and all of those who shared his views were thinking whenever it passed over the brow of a hill that afforded a view of the welter of shell fire over a field cut with shell-craters and trenches which are pitfalls for horses.
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