A few more minutes, and we are through the town, moving slowly along the
Albert-Bapaume road, that famous road which will be a pilgrims' way for
generations to come.

"To other folk," writes an officer quoted by Mr. Buchan in his _Battle
of the Somme_, "and on the maps, one place seems just like another, I
suppose; but to us--La Boisselle and Ovillers--my hat!"

To walk about in those hells! I went along the "sunken road" all the way
to Contalmaison. Talk about sacred ground! The new troops coming up now
go barging across in the most light-hearted way. It means no more to
them than the roads behind used to mean to us. But when I think how we
watered every yard of it with blood and sweat! Children might play there
now, if it didn't look so like the aftermath of an earthquake. I have a
sort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial.

The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter--so far, at least,
as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim scene
itself--held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads and
trampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them.
The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the
air--mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English
garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in
hour by hour.

"The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality
before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La
Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may
topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear