November i6, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
15 
A Day on the Somme 
By Centurion 
I WAS engaged in studying the scheme of mural 
decoration in my friend's room at the H.Q. of the 
— --th Corps. The furniture of the room was de- 
signed for use and not for ornament. It consisted 
of those ascetic deal tables, chairs, and chit-boxes which 
are turned out daily by the sappers with no other assist- 
ance than a hammer, a saw, and a plane. The south 
wall was covered by one of those chefs d' auvre of the 
1st Printing Co. R.E., in which the leading principle 
of composition is a gridiron and the mind of the artist 
seems obsessed by an enthusiasm for geometrical design 
which may be helpful, but is certainly monotonous. 
None the less that map was an unfailing mental stimulant 
to my friend, Colonel X, and he returned to its contem- 
plation again and again with the same feeling of proprietary 
pride as that with which an art collector might return to 
the study of an Old Master. And as is the way with all 
works of art, the more one looked at it the more one saw 
in it. Not only did it show the position of every culvert, 
well, quarry, and ditch behind our lines, but it also bore 
upon it certain conventional signs indicating the exact 
location of our trench railways, supply dumps, and 
observation posts. 
These things were freely and boldly figured in some- 
what the same manner as the maps of the old voyagers 
and merchant adventurers body forth the fauna and 
llora of vague continents, with elephants standing in 
lagoons and negroes reclining under palm-trees. Cer- 
tain coloured lines of an irregular tracery indicated the 
course to the nearest decimals of our front line and 
support trenches, and they were corrected to date. From 
all of which it may be inferred that the Germans, who 
arc great collectors in their way, would have put their 
last shirt on the chances of adding that masterpiece to 
their collection. 
Free Nomenclature 
I was still admiring the bold freedom of its nomencla- 
ture and weighing the uneasy significance of " Flea 
Trenr^," " Acid Drop Copse," and "Stink Alley," when 
my friend the Colonel put his forefinger on a point 
in one of the rectangles, and said " That's Brigade 
H.O., Battalion H.Q. will be about . . . further on ; 
we'll leave the car behind the wood." The point may 
be described, with deliberate ambiguity, as A.2.c.b.3 — 
to use the masonic language of operation orders. 
" You can leave that "behind," said X, pointing to 
my revolver, a Mark VI Webley, which is a pretty heavy 
weapon. " It isn't as if we are going up by night, and 
in any case we shall have a guide. Besides it'll be heavy 
going and we must travel light. when we get beyond that 
most obscene wood. But you'd better take one of 
these." And he handed me a shrapnel helmet. 
" Also this no.se-bag. It's the new pattern." I took 
the canvas bag and slung it over my right shoulder. 
It contained one of the new gas masks known colloqui- 
ally as " emus " ; they give the wearer the appearance 
of a passionate attachment to a baby's feeding-bottle. 
I have heard a blunt soldier describe them as " sling- 
ing your guts outside " ; they certainly do suggest that the 
wearer has only remembered at the last moment to take 
his alimentary canal with him. The bag also contained 
a field-dressing and some morphia tablets. 
Thus equipped we entered our car, taking two other 
officers with us, ortfe of whom beguiled our journey by 
telling us a story of a certain Divisional Commander and 
a. gas-helmet. 
"You should have seen. his face when young Sykes 
opened it hke a lucky-bag," concluded the narrator. 
"Priceless," commented the Colonel. "An earthly 
story with a heavenly meaning. I've often thought 
of compiling a book of Cautionary Tales for Unregenerate 
Generals. They might be issued as a new Army Order." 
It was a good tale, and some dav, with God's grace, 
I will tell it. 
Our car was taking us through undulating country of 
chalk and eravel with hare-bells and yellow toad -flax 
still in bloom ; the slopes of the downs \\ ere scarped with 
these traces of primitive husbandry wliich in the Suutli 
of England are known as " lynchets." The shocks of 
corn were still bivouacked among the stubble, but the 
sheaves were black with rain. Here and there a solitary 
peasant was driving the plough, and the iKjdding horses' 
left a gleam.ing ripple of brown earth behind them. A 
slight mist was breaking into diaphanous wreaths under 
the morning sun and the air was full of an autunuial 
softness. Small parties of men in dust-coloured uni- 
forms, with low flat heads, projecting ears, and underhung 
mouths, passed us at intervals. A peasant paused at his 
husbandry, and, regarding them, spat upon the jjround. 
They were German prisoners 
The Tide of War 
As we approached F— — we were caught up into 
the tide of war, an interminable proccssicju of mounted 
men, limbers, lorries, and colunms of infantry. One had 
the impression of some gigantic power-house standing out 
streams of energy and in that great current of men, horses 
and guns, we lost all sense of our own identity. And as 
we mounted the hill ahead of us where foiu- or five other 
roads met our own at acute angles, we could see four or 
five processions converging upon our own, the tail of 
each procession fading away into the distance and the 
mounted men diminishing into small black objects until 
it seemed as though all the ant-heaps in the world were in 
migration. The nearer we approached the larger the figures 
became until they resolved themselves into thousands upon 
thousands of mounted men, each man carrying panniers of 
shells on either side of his saddle, as though the baskets 
were huge holsters. And before and behind the horse- 
men came and went batteries in column of route, their 
teams straining at the traces as the wheels sank into the 
mud and their drivers raising their short whips to the' 
salute as we passed. And upon the heels of the guns 
followed huge motor lorries. The multitude and variety 
of heraldic symbols upon the tail-boards of those lorries 
told me that nothing less than an army was on the move, 
for each division and each supply column within a division 
has its own device. Here was the fish, the butterfly, 
the cat within the circle, the greyhound rampant, the 
thistle, the shamrock, the three legs, and the inverted 
horseshoe. As all these processions converged upon the 
cross-roads it seemed as if nothing but inextricable con- 
fusion awaited us. But at the meeting of the ways was a 
road control of the M.P^, and the cohmins of men and horses 
and guns writhed in and out with the rhythm of gun- 
teams in a musical ride and so went their : pp Dinted ways. 
On the sky-line funnels of black smoke uprose from 
the earth, expanded into voluminous bouquets, and then 
disappeared. They were German 8-inch shells. As we 
turned sharply to the left in their direction we passed 
our own " heavies," each within a stone's throw of the 
next, and with not so -much as a fig-leaf to lade their 
nakedness, firing at a few Daces over our heads — we felt 
the shock as we passed. 
" They might be firing salutes in Hyde Park," said the 
Colonel contemplatively, " for all the trouble they take 
to hide their light vmder a bushel. The fact is the Hun 
has given up spotting. His flying men never come over 
here for a change of air now. Our owh fellows drop 
cards on 'em every day, but they never return the calls'. 
Beastly impolite I call it. There's the wood ; let's 
get out." 
He pointed to what looked like a row of gibbets on the 
sky-line about a mile away — things that looked fike 
everything but a tree : gaunt, twdsted and bare, and 
resembling not so much a wood as a scaffolding in collapse. 
To reach it we had to pass on foot througli what had 
once been a village, but was now merely a muddy waste 
with here and there a patch of brick and stone embedded 
in the mud. There was not so much as a gable-end left 
standing, and I saw nothing to convince me that the 
place had ever contained a living thing except a woman's 
red flannel petticoat trampled in the mud, a child's wax 
