“. . . . Men of the Company that had been in occupation of the Pill Box awaiting in no very amiable frame of mind the completion of some detail of the relief . . . . I could not tell what they had to be discontented with in that happy land. Around them was all the pomp and pageantry of war—a landscape the like of which man has never gazed upon since early chaos brooded over all. For Westhoek and Flers—the Somme and the Salient—as they were when they were war areas and it was winter—were landscapes that betrayed to the observant all the material content of war. They were the finished product—the perfection towards which that vast Teutonised industry of war is working. Landscapes without colour as of an evil earth in the throes of its dissolution—an earth torn and mangled with its ghost half given up and hanging over-head like a palpable emanation, half agony, half guilt . . . .”