It is a very great difference from that boiling, bursting nightmare of
Pozières, where the whole struggle tightened down to little more than
one narrow hill-top. This battle is now being fought in a sort of
dreamland of brown mudholes, which the blue northern mist turns to a
dull purple grey. The shape of the land is there, the hills, valleys,
lines of willow stumps, ends of broken telegraph poles. But the colour
is all gone. It is as though the bed of the ocean had suddenly risen, as
though the ocean depths had become valleys and the ocean mudbanks hills,
and the whole earth were a creation of slime. It is as though you
suddenly looked out upon the birth of the world, before the grass had
yet begun to spring and when the germs of primitive life still lay in
the slime which covered it; an old, old age before anything moved on the
earth or sang in the air, and when the naked bones of the earth lay bare
under the naked sky century after century, with no change or movement
save when the cloud shadows chased across it, or the storms lashed it,
or the evening sunlight glinted from the water trapped in its
meaningless hollows. It is to that unremembered chaos that German ideas
of life have reduced the world.

Up the hill-side opposite there is running a strange purple-grey streak
between two purple-grey banks. There is something mysterious in this
flat ribbon, ruled, as if by the hand of man, across that primeval
colourless slope. The line of it can be traced distinctly over the hill
and out of sight. It takes a moment's thinking to realise that the grey
streak was once a road. It is a road which one has read of as the centre
of some desultory fighting. I dare say it will appear in its own small
way in history. "The battalion next attacked along the Bapaume-Cambrai
road"--to give it a name it does not own; and readers will picture the
troops in khaki dodging along a hedge, beneath green, leafy elm