THE FOUGHTEN FIELD

I visited the fields of Beaumont-Hamel and Miraumont and Bapaume soon after they had been abandoned, in the pleasant sunshine of an April Sabbath afternoon. It was the abomination of desolation I saw—and felt. Of Beaumont-Hamel there was not a stone left standing, it was not until I had been told that a village once stood there that I began to distinguish the powdered rubble from its surroundings. There was difficulty in doing that, for not only were the buildings demolished, but their bricks crunched and crumbled.

As we approached the old line from ——, the degrees of demolition in the villages showed clearly how near they had stood to the field of fire, and how systematic had been the German bombardment. The remoter villages showed merely sporadic gaps in the walls—which might have been the result of accident rather than of purpose—or a church spire tottering. Nearer villages showed large areas containing not more than the skeletons of houses. The villages which had been in occupation—such as Beaumont-Hamel itself—had not one stone left upon another. The twisted wire straggled through them; the battered trenches wormed about.

We left the car at Miraumont and walked up the old road overlooking the village and Grandcourt Wood. They call it a road for the sake of topography. But did you ever see ring-barked trees standing in a morass?—that is it, with this difference: that these trees are branchless. You can conceive nothing more gaunt and desolate than that colony of splintered trunks standing down in the grassless valley of pools. The pools are shell-holes, so frequent that they have the aspect of a morass striated by thin ridges of black mud. The ridges are the lips of shell-holes.

Miraumont stands down the slope above the wood. It is less completely ruined than Beaumont-Hamel, but by that the more pathetic to look on. You can see what it has been: you cannot judge what Beaumont-Hamel may have been.

As far as you can see in any direction there is no blade of grass, though the spring has begun, and all the earth untouched by war is greening. Between —— and —— the loveliness of the early spring is upon the land; the primrose and the violet are starring the grass in the woods, and all the terraced slopes of the valleys are fair with the young crop. Here you see nothing but brown clay pocked by shell, the graceless grey zigzag of the ruined trench, the litter of deserted arms and equipment and smashed shelter, battered frames of village dwellings, and the limbless deformity of the splintered woods.

We walked up the ruined road beyond Miraumont. Both sides were thick with dug-outs. The road had been a kind of shelter between its low banks. I thought what the traffic on this road must have been when it was ours and the Germans were entrenched beyond it; how it would be shelled because it was low and naturally congested with British traffic; how the dug-outs would be peopled continuously by passers-by flinging themselves in for a momentary respite when the bursts were accurate.... The dug-outs were deep and littered with cast-off great-coats, tunics, scarves, boots; with jam-tins, beef-tins, rusted bayonets, clips of unused cartridge, battered rifles. It had been a road for the supply of ammunition to the front line. Its corners were choked with bombs, shell-case, and small-arm ammunition. In its excavations were dumps of barbed wire unused. You could infer all the busyness and congestion, the problem and the cursing of harassed and supercrowded transport in this road.

We reached the crest of the hill and struck to the left across the old field. This brought us upon a plateau. There had been more intense fighting here than on the slopes. There had been rain incessantly, too. The shell-holes were filled, and they were so frequent that the landscape resembled nothing so much as a coral reef at low tide. It was with the risk of slipping in that one made a way along the field at all. To have fallen in and taken a mouthful of that green liquid would have meant death. Those pools that were not green were red. Either colour implied only the degree of putrefaction of the corpses that lay beneath; but not always beneath. Here protruded a head, there a knee or a shoulder or a buttock; sometimes a gaunt hand alone outstretched from the stinking pool. The pools stunk; the ground stunk; the whole landscape smelt to heaven. My friend had brought, in his wisdom, some black Burmah cheroots. They were as strong as could be got, but they could not overwhelm the revolting stink of human putrefaction that rose all round. One asks what will it be when the spring is advanced and the pools are dry. One asks, too, when and how this land will be re-farmed. It is sown with live bomb and "dud" shell. One foresees the ploughing peasant having the soul blown out of him one spring morning. It will be long before the sword becomes the ploughshare. In the making of the via sacra, too, will there be many casualties.

Fighting on this plateau must have been hellishly intense and deadly. The only conceivable cover was the trench and dug-out: no natural mound nor sheltering bank. The dug-outs were correspondingly deep, burrowing down into the bowels of the earth. Like pimples on the broad face of the plateau were machine-gun and artillery emplacements. These had plainly been built extraordinarily strong, but not strong enough to stand the direct fire to which they had been exposed inevitably. How any structure—or any excavation, indeed—withstands the intensity of modern artillery fire is inconceivable.

The tangles of wire that traversed this high ground were gapped and contorted. A rifle was wrapped about in the murderous mesh; it had been grasped by a human hand; beyond was the man to whom it may have belonged, caught in the same gentle embrace. The steel helmet beneath the network, the rag of tunic flapping in the breeze from the jags, were all-expressive. You needed not to be told explicitly of what they were the symbols.

Near the edge of the plateau was the crater of an exploded mine. It had been sapped from beneath the brow of the rise. Now it was a pond. The hideous deep green hue of the water betrayed the full meaning of that formula: "We exploded a mine and occupied the lip of the crater." Some of them were still occupying it: others were lying in the foul mouth of it.

To look on the whole of it—mottled acres, pimples of emplacements, streak of trench, wall of wire—was to know something of the hellishness of life here when this area was the field of battle.

We stumbled off the tableland into ground which had been German. Immediately beneath the crest they had had their howitzer emplacements. There were battered guns of theirs still there. We nosed down into their dug-outs, built well, and to a depth that was safe. They had been artillery dug-outs; the telephone-wires still crept down the wooden wall beyond the entrance. Below we found hideous dead, some shattered, as though bombed by an invader; heaps of beer-bottles, too, and many German novels. You could visualise these fellows having nights of revelry down there, drinking themselves oblivious to the roar of the guns above. It was possibly in the height of mirth that we broke through and bombed them where they reeled below in festivity. One does not know. This may be maligning them. Possibly they were a temperate lot, filled with zeal for the Fatherland. These bottles may have been the moderate collection of months. They may have been bombed beneath because they had decided to die hard. The facile assumption is far too common that the German is a drunken brute whose hobby is debauchery.

The area about the gun emplacements was littered with scores of tons of ammunition, which will probably never be salved. Littered with bombs it is too, and with trench helmets, and the leather and brass and iron of equipment. We got many souvenirs here, creeping about like ghouls among the dead and the heaps of material.

We returned to the main road past the groups of irregular graves, past the French labour-parties at work upon fresh roads and upon salvage, back to the skeleton of Miraumont. Then the car swept down behind Beaumont-Hamel, through the woods to Albert, which we skirted by the putty factory. The Virgin with her Child looked down, hideously maimed, from the cathedral spire. We came home through the ridges and the avenues of Acheux, down the valley of the Authie.