top. We could see occasional figures strolling about the old German
trenches--probably from posts established here or there behind the line
of battle. All day long odd men wandered up or down some part of the
hill-side--a guard with a German prisoner coming down, a messenger or
stretcher-bearers going up. Now and then one could even see heads, with
our flat steel helmets on them, showing out from the red trench against
the skyline. So the fighting could not be severe at the moment on the
crest of the hill.

Yet we were clearly not holding the whole of that skyline trench. On its
southern or right-hand shoulder the hill ran into Fricourt Wood, which
covered all that end of it. At the lower end of the wood, standing out
against it, was the dusty yellow ruin which once was Fricourt. Behind
that shoulder of the hill was a valley, of which we could see the gentle
green slopes stretching away to Mametz and Montauban, both taken the day
before, in the first half-day's fighting. The green slopes must have
been covered with the relics of that attack. But the kindly grass, the
uncut growth of two years, hid them; and the valley, except for a few
thin white trench lines, might have been any other smiling summer
landscape.

When the wave of our attack swept through that country the Germans in
Fricourt village and wood still held on. Another promontory was left
jutting out into the wave of our attack in a similar village on our
left--La Boiselle, where the main road for Bapaume runs straight out
from our lines through the German front. We could see this heap of
yellow-brown ruins sticking up beyond the left shoulder of the opposite
hill much as Fricourt did on its right. There was a valley between, but
it could only be guessed. Boiselle, too, had the remains of a small wood
rising behind it. The bark hung from its ragged stumps as the rigging