Far the pleasanter journey you'll have by boarding your motor-lorry on a fine summer morning. The country smiles all about you. _Smile_ is the only word. You catch the infection of green bank, green plain flecked with brown and gold stubble and streaked with groves of elm and beech, poplar and plane: you get infected and rejoice. If you climb the crest of one of the slopes less gentle than most slopes here, you may look down on it all--on the double line of trees setting-off here and there across the plains, up the slopes, down the valleys, marking the roads, of which trees are the invariable index; at the winding stream, banked with hop and willow, flowing through a belt of richer greenness: that's how you know a stream from a height--not by the water, of which you see nothing for the groves that border it, but by the irregularity of these plantations (the roads are planted with a deliberate symmetry) and the deepening in the colour of the lush grasses of the basin. You'll look down, too, on the villages dropped irregularly along its course. There's the low roof, the gable, the amorphous mass of greys and yellows topped by the pyramidal church spire rising grey slate to its summit. The number of villages you may see in thirty square miles of the Somme district is amazing. The whole Somme Valley is a mazed network of roads and streams, with groves and harvest-fields in the crowding interstices, the whole teeming with grey villages. This is the character of the country; and very lovely it is. From your hilltop you'll see, perhaps, a bombing-school at play in the valley--the line of murderous, irregular bursts in their white, vapourish smoke, all forced into the extremity of unnaturalness by the deep colour of the wood behind. In June the depth of the colour in this French country gave the sky itself a depth of colour not known in Australia. The cumulus resting on the sky-line would be arresting in its contrast with wood and pasture, and the blue of the gaps above it heightened too. Sometimes the days were clouded in the vault, but with a clear horizon; then you would get a kind of rich opalescence, the sunlight shut out above deflected and concentrated in the glowing horizon, its streaks of colour intensified fourfold by the depth of green in the landscape. Some such middle afternoons I never shall forget.