[Illustration: V. _Warwickshires entering Peronne._] How did they do it? "I want to go home."--Does anyone realise what those words must have meant to them then? I believe I do now--a little bit. Even I, from my back, looking-on position, sometimes felt the terrible fear, the longing to get away. What must they have felt? "From battle, murder and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us." On up the hill past the mines to Pozieres. An Army railway was then running through Pozieres, and the station was marked by a big wooden sign painted black and white, like you see at any country station in England, with POZIERES in large Roman letters, but that's all there was of Pozieres except a little red in the mud. I remember later, at the R.F.C. H.Q., Maurice Baring showed me a series of air-photographs of Pozieres as it was in 1914, with its peaceful little streets and rows of trees. What a contrast to the Pozieres as it was in 1917--MUD. Further on, the Butte stood out on the right, a heap of chalky mud, not a blade of grass round it then--nothing but mud, with a white cross on the top. On the left, the Crown Prince's dug-out and Gibraltar--I suppose these have gone now--and Le Sars and Grevillers, at that time General Birdwood's H.Q., where the church had been knocked into a fine shape. I tried to draw it, but was much put off by air fighting. It seemed a favourite spot for this. Bapaume must always have been a dismal place, like Albert, but (p. 020) Peronne must have been lovely, looking up from the water; and the main _Place_ must have been most imposing, but then it was very sad. The Boche had only left it about three weeks, and it had not been "cleaned up." But the real terribleness of the Somme was not in the towns or on the roads. One felt it as one wandered over the old battlefields of La Boisselle, Courcelette, Thiepval, Grandcourt, Miraumont, Beaumont-Hamel, Bazentin-le-Grand and Bazentin-le-Petit--the whole country practically untouched since the great day when the Boche was pushed back and it was left in peace once more. A hand lying on the duckboards; a Boche and a Highlander locked in a deadly embrace at the edge of Highwood; the "Cough-drop" with the stench coming from its watery bottom; the shell-holes with the shapes of bodies faintly showing through the putrid water--all these things made one think terribly of what human beings had been through, and were going through a bit further on, and would be going through for perhaps years more--who knew how many? I remember an officer saying to me, "Paint the Somme? I could do it from memory--just a flat horizon-line and mud-holes and water, with the stumps of a few battered trees," but one could not paint the smell.