We move on up the road. Now we are among what remains of the trenches
and dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's despatch. "During nearly
two years' preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render these
defences impregnable," says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on to
describe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters,
and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the
winter has made us at home--on paper--so familiar. "The numerous woods
and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses." The deep
cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country,
provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were
often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty
feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields,
concrete gun emplacements--everything that the best brains of the German
Army could devise for our destruction--had been lavished on the German
lines. And behind the first line was a second--and behind the second
line a third. And now here we stand in the midst of what was once so
vast a system. What remains of it--and of all the workings of the German
mind that devised it? We leave the motor and go to look into the
dug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germans
flung themselves at the approach of our men after the bombardment, and
then Captain F. guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and we
sink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over what
once was Ovillers, northward towards Thiépval, and the slopes behind
which runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and naked
land, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of some
of the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard by
yard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain,
mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Allies
might live.