Near the edge of the plateau was the crater of an exploded mine. It had been sapped from beneath the brow of the rise. Now it was a pond. The hideous deep green hue of the water betrayed the full meaning of that formula: "We exploded a mine and occupied the lip of the crater." Some of them were still occupying it: others were lying in the foul mouth of it.
To look on the whole of it--mottled acres, pimples of emplacements, streak of trench, wall of wire--was to know something of the hellishness of life here when this area was the field of battle.
We stumbled off the tableland into ground which had been German. Immediately beneath the crest they had had their howitzer emplacements. There were battered guns of theirs still there. We nosed down into their dug-outs, built well, and to a depth that was safe. They had been artillery dug-outs; the telephone-wires still crept down the wooden wall beyond the entrance. Below we found hideous dead, some shattered, as though bombed by an invader; heaps of beer-bottles, too, and many German novels. You could visualise these fellows having nights of revelry down there, drinking themselves oblivious to the roar of the guns above. It was possibly in the height of mirth that we broke through and bombed them where they reeled below in festivity. One does not know. This may be maligning them. Possibly they were a temperate lot, filled with zeal for the Fatherland. These bottles may have been the moderate collection of months. They may have been bombed beneath because they had decided to die hard. The facile assumption is far too common that the German is a drunken brute whose hobby is debauchery.
The area about the gun emplacements was littered with scores of tons of ammunition, which will probably never be salved. Littered with bombs it is too, and with trench helmets, and the leather and brass and iron of equipment. We got many souvenirs here, creeping about like ghouls among the dead and the heaps of material.
We returned to the main road past the groups of irregular graves, past the French labour-parties at work upon fresh roads and upon salvage, back to the skeleton of Miraumont. Then the car swept down behind Beaumont-Hamel, through the woods to Albert, which we skirted by the putty factory. The Virgin with her Child looked down, hideously maimed, from the cathedral spire. We came home through the ridges and the avenues of Acheux, down the valley of the Authie.
