I tried to draw it, but was much put off by air fighting.

It seemed a favourite spot for this.
Bapaume must always have been a dismal place, like Albert, but (p.

020) Peronne must have been lovely, looking up from the water; and the main _Place_ must have been most imposing, but then it was very sad.
The Boche had only left it about three weeks, and it had not been "cleaned up." But the real terribleness of the Somme was not in the towns or on the roads.

One felt it as one wandered over the old battlefields of La Boisselle, Courcelette, Thiepval, Grandcourt, Miraumont, Beaumont-Hamel, Bazentin-le-Grand and Bazentin-le-Petit--the whole country practically untouched since the great day when the Boche was pushed back and it was left in peace once more.
A hand lying on the duckboards; a Boche and a Highlander locked in a deadly embrace at the edge of Highwood; the "Cough-drop" with the stench coming from its watery bottom; the shell-holes with the shapes of bodies faintly showing through the putrid water--all these things made one think terribly of what human beings had been through, and were going through a bit further on, and would be going through for perhaps years more--who knew how many?
I remember an officer saying to me, "Paint the Somme?
I could do it from memory--just a flat horizon-line and mud-holes and water, with the stumps of a few battered trees," but one could not paint the smell.
Early one morning in Amiens I got a message from Colonel John Buchan asking me to breakfast at the "Hotel du Rhin." While we were having breakfast, there was a great noise outside--an English voice was cursing someone else hard and telling him to get on and not make an ass of himself.

Then a Flying Pilot was pushed in by an Observer.