country is wholly red.

[Illustration: A MAIN STREET OF POZIÈRES IN A QUIET INTERVAL DURING THE
FIGHT]

[Illustration: THE CHURCH, POZIÈRES]

But even this did not prepare one for the desolation of the place
itself. Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have
been cast for years outside some dry, derelict, God-forsaken up-country
township. Imagine some broken-down creek bed in the driest of our dry
central Australian districts, abandoned for a generation to the goats,
in which the hens have been scratching as long as men can remember. Then
take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving
thing. You must not even leave a spider. Put here, in evidence of some
old tumbled roof, a few roof beams and tiles sticking edgeways from the
ground, and the low faded ochre stump of the windmill peeping over the
top of the hill, and there you have Pozières.

I know of nothing approaching that desolation. Perhaps it is that the
place is still in the thick of the fight. In most other ruins behind
battlefields that I have seen there are the signs of men again--perhaps
men who have visited the place like yourself. There is life, anyhow,
somewhere in the landscape. In this place there is no sign of life at
all. When you stand in Pozières to-day, and are told that you will find
the front trench across another hundred yards of shell-holes, you know
that there must be life in the landscape. The dead hill-side a few
hundred yards before you must contain both your men and the Germans. But
as in most battlefields, where the warmest corner is, there is the least
sign of movement. Dry shell crater upon shell crater upon shell