at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.

The only relief to this one-sided struggle against machinery was the
hand-to-hand fighting that occurred in the two trenches
before-mentioned--the second-line German trench behind Pozières and the
similar trench in front of it. The story of it will be told some day--it
would almost deserve a book to itself.




CHAPTER XVI

AN ABYSM OF DESOLATION

_France, August 1st._


When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation
could reach. A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under
which men had burrowed like rats, but with method, so as to make a city
underneath the shattered foundations of the village. And then their rat
city had been crushed in from above; and through the splintered timbered
entrances you peered into a dark interior of dishevelled blankets and
scattered clothing. It was only too evident that there had been no time
as yet, in the hustle of battle, to search these ghastly, noisome
dug-outs for the Germans who had been bombed there. The mine craters in
the white chalk of La Boiselle are big enough to hide a large church.

But for sheer desolation it will not compare with Pozières. On the top