skyline, beyond the valley's end, stood out a distant line of ghostly
trees--so faint and blue as to be scarcely distinguishable from the sky.
There was nothing else in the landscape--absolutely nothing but the
bare, blank shape of the land; save for those old ghosts of departed
willows--no trees--no grass--no colour--no living or moving or singing
or sounding thing.

Only--that morning at dawn had found a number of men tumbling, jumping,
running, dodging in and out of the shell-holes across that slope,
making towards our lines. The peck of occasional rifles came from some
farther part of the grey, featureless hill-side--the report was the only
trace of the rifles or of the men firing them. But as the men who were
dodging back were Australians the rifles must have been the rifles of
Germans, in trenches or shell-holes, somewhere on the face of that
waste. Who these Australians were, the men who watched from where we
stood did not know. Apparently they were men who had lost their way in
the dark and wandered beyond our trenches; as the light grew they had
suddenly realised that they were in front of our front line, and not
behind it, as they thought, and had come tumbling back over the craters.
They all reached the trench safely.

For this battle has now reached such a formless, featureless landscape,
that it is a hard thing to tell whether you are looking at your own
country or the German country, or the country between the lines. The
stretch between the two sides has for the moment widened, the Germans
abandoning many of their waterlogged, sodden ditches close in front of
our lines, and contenting themselves with fighting a sort of rearguard
action there, while they tunnel, bore, dig, burrow like moles into the
farther heights where their reserve line runs near Bapaume. The battle
has widened out generally over the landscape.