So we went on up a battered trench to the O.P. In it a subaltern and two signallers, all three caked in mud. At the moment the wire to the battery was intact. Two men had been killed and one wounded whilst mending it. From here we could see the famous Quadrangle Trench, which at that time was holding up the advance. Many batteries were shooting at it. Having got our bearings, so to speak, we did not linger in this most unhealthy spot, but returned to the battery position. On the way home met our own colonel bearing the news that the brigade would probably go into action in quite a different area. This news confirmed at H.Q. at 5 P.M. Turned back and reconnoitred the new position, which was farther south, nearer Fricourt; rather cramped and quite unprepared for occupation. Cadged dinner from an old friend whom we met at D.H.Q. Met the battery on the road about 10 P.M. and led it to new position. Work of getting guns in, ammunition and stores dumped, and teams away completed by 3 A.M. Awaited dawn. _July 6._—As soon as it was light went up the hill on the right front of the battery to meet the colonel, choose an O.P. and ‘learn’ the country. The scene of wreckage upon this hill now is past all belief, and is, I should imagine, a perfect example of the havoc wrought by a modern ‘intense’ bombardment. The whole face of the earth is completely altered. On the German side of No Man’s Land, not one square yard of the original surface of the ground remains unbroken. Line upon line of trenches and tunnels and saps have been so smashed that they are barely recognisable as such: there are mine craters seventy to a hundred yards across, and there are dug-outs (some of these still intact) which go down fifty feet and more into the chalk. On every side is débris—rails, timber, kit, blankets, broken rifles, bread, steel helmets, pumps, respirators, corpses. And nowhere can one get away from the sickening smell—the smell of putrescent human flesh....