The Somme country was an extension of the British line. As our army doubled, trebled, quadrupled, so it multiplied the extent of France which it defended. From the flats of Flanders and Northern France we gradually progressed to a more diversified country of long ridges and downs, pleasanter in peace but equally terrible in war. As you approach it now by train the cemeteries roll into view on every hand. The dead are as it were drawn up in solid columns to greet you as you pass, as it were one live man were monarch o'er all the dead. The Army that went to guard the line is still there, still on duty--in Plot A, Plot B, Plot C, Plot Z, of multitudinous war-cemeteries marked now by map-references. The dead challenge the living in choruses of silence from broad fields of burial. The hills remain like great mounds in the mist, the same bare ridges of Cæsar's wars two thousand years ago, the same o'er which perchance mankind will climb to death as many centuries hence, antediluvian hummocks of old earth, somnolent, green, indifferent. Earth suggests itself constantly as something mightier than man. It is not the prostrate earth of Ypres Salient, but one which war has much less power to sear. Man's habitations and cities topple down, forests are fired away, but the elemental lines and contours of the hills remain unbroken and as it were indifferent both to time and history. These rivers too, by which men name their battles, flow on, flow away without a conscious memory even of a yesterday. The innocence of the Somme, the virginity of the Ancre, these have overcome all hate and blood, and lightly forgotten them.