During the first visit to the battlefields of the Somme in the winter of 1916, the outstanding feature of the landscape was the mud and the general desolation. In the summer of 1917 the scenes of desolation were as great as ever, but there was a difference--the roads were in excellent condition and bridges had been replaced. There were shell-holes everywhere and the countryside was strewn with dud shells; barbed wire entanglements; with here and there a stranded tank that had had to be abandoned in the mud; the remains of trenches and dug-outs or the cages in which the Huns had collected their British prisoners. There were no domestic animals to be seen, and no civilians. The whole district from Albert to Peronne, to Bapaume or to Arras, was one huge cemetery, and one saw side by side the elaborate cross that marked the burying place of German dead, the smaller cross with the tricolour on it, that marked the last resting-place of the soldier of France, and everywhere for miles and miles could be seen the little plain brown crosses of wood, that marked the spot where lay our own loved dead. We climbed to the top of the famous Butte of Warlincourt that so often changed hands in the course of desperate fighting, and there on the top were those little brown crosses. We stood at the edge of the vast crater of La Boiselle that inaugurated the first battle of the Somme and saw in its depths several of those little symbols of our Christian faith, but looking away across the desolation of the battlefield one marvelled at the efforts of nature to hide up the ravages of war. There were the most glorious masses of colour everywhere--the colour given by the wild flowers of the battlefields. One felt one had never seen more vivid blue than that of the acres of cornflowers which rivalled the hues of the gentian of the Alps. It may have been imagination, but looking out from the Butte of Warlincourt over miles of poppies, one felt one had never seen such vivid red, and instinctively those words came into one's mind: 'O Cross that liftest up my head, I dare not seek to fly from thee; I lay in dust life's glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red, Life that shall endless be.' The wild flowers of Picardy have bloomed over British graves again in the summer of 1918, though German, not British, eyes saw them during the early months, but those flowers speak of eternal hope, and tell us that if we but do our part, the sacrifice of our bravest and best will not have been made in vain.