away, if that. It was a growing wood--with the green still on the branches, very different from the charred posts and tree stumps which are all that now remain of the gardens and orchards of Pozieres. I remember a little over a month ago, when some of us first went up near to Pozieres village--on the day when the bombardment before our first attack was tearing branches from off the trees a hundred yards away--Pozieres had a fairly decent covering then. There was enough dead brushwood and twigs, at any rate, to hide the buildings of the place. A few pink walls could then be half seen behind the branches, or topping the gaps in the scrub. Within four days the screen in front of Pozieres had been torn to shreds--had utterly disappeared. The German bombardment ripped off all that the British had left. The buildings now stood up quite naked, such as they were. There was the church--still recognisable by one window; and a scrap of red wall at the north-east end of the village, past which you then had to crawl to reach an isolated run of trench facing the windmill. Both trench and red wall have long since gone to glory. I doubt if you could even trace either of them now. The solitary arched window disappeared early, and a tumbled heap of bricks is all that now marks Pozieres church. One scrap of gridironed roof sticking out from the powdered ground cross-hatches the horizon. There is not so much foliage left as would shelter a cock sparrow. But here were we, with this desolation behind us, looking out suddenly and at no great distance on quite a respectable wood. It tempted you to step out there and just walk over to it--I never see that country without the feeling that one is quite free to step across there and explore it. There are men coming up the farther side of the slope--men going about some normal business of the day as our men go about theirs in the places behind their lines. Those men are Germans; and the village in the trees, the collection of buildings half guessed in the wood, is Courcelette. It has been hidden ground to us for so long that you feel it is almost improper to be overlooking them so constantly; like spending your day prying over into your neighbour's yard. Away in the landscape behind, in some hollow, there humps itself into the air a big geyser of chestnut dust. One has seen German shell burst so often in that fashion, back in our hinterland, that it takes a moment to realise that this shell is not German but British. I cannot see what it is aimed at--some battery, I suppose; or perhaps a much-used road; or some place they suspect to be a headquarters. Clearly, it is not always so safe as it seems to be in the green country behind the German lines. CHAPTER XIX