Late in September they started across the old Somme battlefield, which the Germans had devastated in their retreat in the late winter of 1917 in face of the Anglo-French offensives. Here the results of war on the largest integral area in France were seen at their worst in a dismal, treeless landscape, pitted by the bursts of the countless shells fired in the Somme and Cambrai battles and the fighting in the period between them, and in the tidal wave of the great German offensive of March, 1918, which overflowed the desert of their making. The subsoil, having been mixed with the loam that once nourished succulent pasturage and rich fields of grain, now responded to sun and moisture in a subtropical growth of weeds and grass in a grizzly carpet, variegated by the gaping wounds in the earth of crumbling trench walls and great mine craters. Deserted tanks, and remnants of sheet-iron dugout roofs and of gun-carriages and caissons recalled as the débris of a dead world ghostly memories to all British soldiers, for at one time or another all had fought there, enduring the powers of destruction that made the wreckage. Troops marching in this area, where man had at such labor and cost imitated the forces of earthquakes, volcanoes, and of chaos, found few billets. The villages were mostly level with the roads. Temporary buildings, with corrugated iron roofs and tar-paper walls, which would be called "shacks," had risen as the landmarks of pioneer hospitality. The two divisions marching toward the sound of guns through the silence where there was neither woman nor child living could people it with what reflections they chose on their way to battle. They were attached to the Australian Corps, which was company to their taste. There were no better soldiers than the "Aussies." Our men liked them not only for this but for other qualities which have a man-to-man appeal when men from the ends of the earth meet. In the coming attack we were to have more intimate reasons for liking them: the reasons born of the gratitude which one brave man owes to another who does not hesitate at hell's door to come to his aid when he is hard pressed.