The catch of helmets was indeed quite considerable.Then Iperceived on the road bank above and marching parallel with this column, a double file of still muddier Germans.Either they wore caps or went bare-headed.There were no helmets among them.We do not rob our prisoners but--a helmet is a weapon.Anyhow, it is an irresistible souvenir.
Now and then one sees afar off an ammunition dump, many hundreds of stacks of shells--without their detonators as yet--being unloaded from railway trucks, transferred from the broad gauge to the narrow gauge line, or loaded onto motor trolleys.Now and then one crosses a railway line.The railway lines run everywhere behind the British front, the construction follows the advance day by day.They go up as fast as the guns.One's guide remarks as the car bumps over the level crossing, "That is one of Haig's railways." It is an aspect of the Commander-in-Chief that has much impressed and pleased the men.And at last we begin to enter the region of the former Allied trenches, we pass the old German front line, we pass ruined houses, ruined fields, and thick patches of clustering wooden crosses and boards where the dead of the opening assaults lie.There are no more reapers now, there is no more green upon the fields, there is no green anywhere, scarcely a tree survives by the roadside, but only overthrown trunks and splintered stumps; the fields are wildernesses of shell craters and coarse weeds, the very woods are collections of blasted stems and stripped branches.This absolutely ravaged and ruined battlefield country extends now along the front of the Somme offensive for a depth of many miles;across it the French and British camps and batteries creep forward, the stores, the dumps, the railways creep forward, in their untiring, victorious thrust against the German lines.
Overhead hum and roar the aeroplanes, away towards the enemy the humped, blue sausage-shaped kite balloons brood thoughtfully, and from this point and that, guns, curiously invisible until they speak, flash suddenly and strike their one short hammer-blow of sound.
Then one sees an enemy shell drop among the little patch of trees on the crest to the right, and kick up a great red-black mass of smoke and dust.We see it, and then we hear the whine of its arrival and at last the bang.The Germans are blind now, they have lost the air, they are firing by guesswork and their knowledge of the abandoned territory.
"They think they have got divisional headquarters there," someone remarks...."They haven't.But they keep on."In this zone where shells burst the wise automobile stops and tucks itself away as inconspicuously as possible close up to a heap of ruins.There is very little traffic on the road now except for a van or so that hurries up, unloads, and gets back as soon as possible.Mules and men are taking the stuff the rest of the journey.We are in a flattened village, all undermined by dug-outs that were in the original German second line.We report ourselves to a young troglodyte in one of these, and are given a guide, and so set out on the last part of the journey to the ultimate point, across the land of shell craters and barbed wire litter and old and new trenches.We have all put on British steel helmets, hard but heavy and inelegant head coverings.Ican write little that is printable about these aesthetic crimes.
The French and German helmets are noble and beautiful things.
These lumpish /pans./..
They ought to be called by the name of the man who designed them.
Presently we are advised to get into a communication trench.It is not a very attractive communication trench, and we stick to our track across the open.Three or four shells shiver overhead, but we decide they are British shells, going out.We reach a supporting trench in which men are waiting in a state of nearly insupportable boredom for the midday stew, the one event of interest in a day-long vigil.Here we are told imperatively to come right in at once, and we do.
All communication trenches are tortuous and practically endless.
