As far as you can see in any direction there is no blade of grass, though the spring has begun, and all the earth untouched by war is greening. Between ---- and ---- the loveliness of the early spring is upon the land; the primrose and the violet are starring the grass in the woods, and all the terraced slopes of the valleys are fair with the young crop. Here you see nothing but brown clay pocked by shell, the graceless grey zigzag of the ruined trench, the litter of deserted arms and equipment and smashed shelter, battered frames of village dwellings, and the limbless deformity of the splintered woods. We walked up the ruined road beyond Miraumont. Both sides were thick with dug-outs. The road had been a kind of shelter between its low banks. I thought what the traffic on this road must have been when it was ours and the Germans were entrenched beyond it; how it would be shelled because it was low and naturally congested with British traffic; how the dug-outs would be peopled continuously by passers-by flinging themselves in for a momentary respite when the bursts were accurate.... The dug-outs were deep and littered with cast-off great-coats, tunics, scarves, boots; with jam-tins, beef-tins, rusted bayonets, clips of unused cartridge, battered rifles. It had been a road for the supply of ammunition to the front line. Its corners were choked with bombs, shell-case, and small-arm ammunition. In its excavations were dumps of barbed wire unused. You could infer all the busyness and congestion, the problem and the cursing of harassed and supercrowded transport in this road.