and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour,
till there is nothing left but mud and dust.

Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here
has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some
"hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil's
dough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see.
Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square
miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake
between the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison
there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering
of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and
torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the
countryside.

Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of
the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course.
"British!" says the officer in front--who was himself in the battle.
Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of the
German front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get our
bearings. There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, are
two trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, the
British and the enemy front lines. From that further line, at half-past
seven on the summer morning for ever blazoned in the annals of our
people, the British Army went over the parapet, to gather in the victory
prepared for it by the deadly strength and accuracy of British guns;
made possible in its turn by the labour in far-off England of millions
of workers--men and women--on the lathes and in the filling factories of
these islands.