Looking at the enemy line in front of our own line here, one sees little but a gentle crest, protected by wire, in front of another gentle crest, also wired, with other gentle crests beyond and to the left. To the right there is a blur of gentle crests behind tree-tops. It is plain from a glance that gullies run irregularly into the spurs here, and make the defence easy. All through the fighting here, it happened too often that the taking of one crest only meant that the winners were taken in flank by machine guns in the crest beyond, and (in this bit of the line) by other guns on the other side of the river. Well to the back of the English line here, on the top of the plateau, level with Auchonvillers, some trees stand upon the skyline, with the tower of a church, battered, but not destroyed, like the banner of some dauntless one, a little to the west of the wood. The wood shows marks of shelling, but nothing like the marks on the woods attacked by our own men. There are signs of houses among the trees, and the line of a big wood to the east of them. This church and the buildings near it are parts of Mesnil village, most of which lies out of sight on the further side of the crest. They are conspicuous landmarks, and can be made out from many parts of the field. The chalk scarp on which they stand is by much the most beautiful thing on the battlefield, and the sight of Mesnil church tower on the top of it is most pleasant. That little banner stood all through the war, and not all the guns of the enemy could bring it down. Many men in the field near Mesnil, enduring the mud of the thaw, and the lice, wet, and squalor of dugouts near the front, were cheered by that church tower. "For all their bloody talk the bastards couldn't bring it down." The hill with the lines upon it slopes steeply down to the valley of the Ancre. Just where the lines come to the valley, the ground drops abruptly, in a cliff or steep bank, twenty-five feet high, to the road. Our line on this slope covers the village of Hamel, which lies just behind the line, along the road and on the hill-slopes above it. The church and churchyard of Hamel, both utterly ruined, lie well up the hill in such a position that they made good posts from which our snipers could shoot across the river at men in the Schwaben Redoubt. Crocuses, snowdrops, and a purple flower once planted on the graves of the churchyard, but now escaped into the field, blossomed here in this wintry spring, long before any other plant on the battlefield was in bud.