We move on up the road. Now we are among what remains of the trenches and dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's despatch. "During nearly two years' preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render these defences impregnable," says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on to describe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters, and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the winter has made us at home--on paper--so familiar. "The numerous woods and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses." The deep cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country, provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields, concrete gun emplacements--everything that the best brains of the German Army could devise for our destruction--had been lavished on the German lines. And behind the first line was a second--and behind the second line a third. And now here we stand in the midst of what was once so vast a system. What remains of it--and of all the workings of the German mind that devised it? We leave the motor and go to look into the dug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germans flung themselves at the approach of our men after the bombardment, and then Captain F. guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and we sink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over what once was Ovillers, northward towards Thiépval, and the slopes behind which runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and naked land, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of some of the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard by yard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain, mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Allies might live. "_There were no stragglers, none_!" Let us never forget that cry of exultant amazement wrung from the lips of an eye-witness, who saw the young untried troops go over the parapet in the July dawn and disappear into the hell beyond. And there in the packed graveyards that dot these slopes lie thousands of them in immortal sleep; and as the Greeks in after days knew no nobler oath than that which pledged a man by those who fell at Marathon, so may the memory of those who fell here burn ever in the heart of England, a stern and consecrating force. "Life is but the pebble sunk, Deeds the circle growing!"