Later in the day from one of our O.P.'s I began a sketch of the whole panorama of the battle. Desolate ragged country, torn with shell wounds; the poor scarecrow trees like arms stretched up to heaven for help. Fields that once were golden with corn now grey and scarred with white trenches that look like a network of pale worms lying where they died.
Now, from another O.P. I'm looking at the arid chaos below. Arid and lonely-looking, but not silent. A strafe is on. Seems to be getting louder and more continuous. We passed on our way here a great naval gun crashing out death to the burrowing Huns. Swallow doesn't like naval guns.
From flimsy net shelters flash the expensive guns, and the bombardment gathers strength, gathers volume, until you'd think something must burst--the world or the universe: either might split from end to end. The dust and smoke are gradually making everything invisible. Crumps come whistling and heaving up great clouds of heavy blackness. We look at our watches. Zero hour in five minutes. The aeroplanes buzzing aloft, and the sausages sitting among the low clouds, inert and so vulnerable-looking. Can there be anything left? Can a single soul live?
[Illustration: TRENCHES BETWEEN FRICOURT AND LA BOISELLE They don't look much like trenches, because they were battered to pieces. A 'dump' on the near horizon was hit by a Boche shell. It blazed and crackled and smouldered all night, a drifting column of dull pink smoke.]
Surely we shall get through. Even in spite of the rain. The rain has made the country into a quagmire.
Reconnoitred the front trenches to-day with the Colonel, in a particular part where everything is at sixes and sevens, and no one quite knows what we haven't or have got. Most odd. Shells of all calibres bursting on every side--corpses, odours unspeakable.
You see, things are expected to happen soon, and so I'm anxious to know all about it. This part of the line is terrific.
Where we are, and for miles and miles around, myriads of troops, cavalry, artillery, everything, all camped in the open--no concealment. Mud? Why, everyone is mud, up to the eyes, and so are the horses. This big movement has quite dislocated the ordinary trench warfare, and now all over the dreary uplands are trenches hurriedly dug by the Hun and then abandoned. Trenches that often barely shelter you above the knees. Chaos, chaos. Rifles lying to rust in the mud, duds everywhere, men sitting in dug-outs, not knowing what they are expected to do next. Others in mere scratched-out shelters or in actual shell holes. Sometimes they sing. Often they are asleep. Wreckage indescribable. Shrapnel cracking into black clouds close by. Enormous and magnificent H.E.'s hurling up black earth and red earth, and smoke that drifts slowly and solidly away to limbo. Poor dead men lying about, and dead horses, too. And in the trenches this limitless porridge of mud. Cr-r-r-ump! go the crumps searching out a battery. But oh the woods--the poor scarecrow woods. I was in a famous wood that looked positively devilish in its sinister nakedness. And it's September, too, when woods are so often at their loveliest. Not a leaf--not one single leaf; and, instead of undergrowth, just tossed earth, fuses, a boot, a coat, some wire, and above-ground dead men. Below-ground (or as far below as they can get in the time) live men.