We reached the crest of the hill and struck to the left across the old field. This brought us upon a plateau. There had been more intense fighting here than on the slopes. There had been rain incessantly, too. The shell-holes were filled, and they were so frequent that the landscape resembled nothing so much as a coral reef at low tide. It was with the risk of slipping in that one made a way along the field at all. To have fallen in and taken a mouthful of that green liquid would have meant death. Those pools that were not green were red. Either colour implied only the degree of putrefaction of the corpses that lay beneath; but not always beneath. Here protruded a head, there a knee or a shoulder or a buttock; sometimes a gaunt hand alone outstretched from the stinking pool. The pools stunk; the ground stunk; the whole landscape smelt to heaven. My friend had brought, in his wisdom, some black Burmah cheroots. They were as strong as could be got, but they could not overwhelm the revolting stink of human putrefaction that rose all round. One asks what will it be when the spring is advanced and the pools are dry. One asks, too, when and how this land will be re-farmed. It is sown with live bomb and "dud" shell. One foresees the ploughing peasant having the soul blown out of him one spring morning. It will be long before the sword becomes the ploughshare. In the making of the _via sacra_, too, will there be many casualties. Fighting on this plateau must have been hellishly intense and deadly. The only conceivable cover was the trench and dug-out: no natural mound nor sheltering bank. The dug-outs were correspondingly deep, burrowing down into the bowels of the earth. Like pimples on the broad face of the plateau were machine-gun and artillery emplacements. These had plainly been built extraordinarily strong, but not strong enough to stand the direct fire to which they had been exposed inevitably. How any structure--or any excavation, indeed--withstands the intensity of modern artillery fire is inconceivable. The tangles of wire that traversed this high ground were gapped and contorted. A rifle was wrapped about in the murderous mesh; it had been grasped by a human hand; beyond was the man to whom it may have belonged, caught in the same gentle embrace. The steel helmet beneath the network, the rag of tunic flapping in the breeze from the jags, were all-expressive. You needed not to be told explicitly of what they were the symbols. Near the edge of the plateau was the crater of an exploded mine. It had been sapped from beneath the brow of the rise. Now it was a pond. The hideous deep green hue of the water betrayed the full meaning of that formula: "We exploded a mine and occupied the lip of the crater." Some of them were still occupying it: others were lying in the foul mouth of it.