As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the tragedy which had
happened here, the indigo afternoon could not have been better chosen.
Description fails to do justice to the abomination of desolation of that
vast battle-field in the rain, and the imagination, refuses to
reconstruct the scene of peace--the chateaux and happy villages, the
forests and pastures, that flourished here so brief a time ago. In my
fancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, were
for the moment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had rolled here
and extinguished all life. Beside the road only the blood-red soil
betrayed the sites of powdered villages; and through it, in every
direction, trenches had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was
torn and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing process, in its
moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus. On the hummocks were graves,
graves marked by wooden crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the
ground. Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon that
had cost priceless hours of skilled labour; and once we were confronted
by one of those monsters, wounded to the death, I had seen that morning.
The sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emotions I had
felt, as a child, when contemplating dead elephants in a battle picture
of the army of a Persian king.

Presently, like the peak of some submerged land, we saw lifted out of
that rolling waste the "Butt" of Warlencourt--the burial-mound of this
modern Marathon. It is honeycombed with dugouts in which the Germans who
clung to it found their graves, while the victorious British army swept
around it toward Bapaume. Everywhere along that road, which runs like an
arrow across the battle-field to Albert, were graves. Repetition seems
the only method of giving an adequate impression of their numbers; and
near what was once the village of Pozieres was the biggest grave of all,