10 
LAND & WATER 
December 28, 191 7 
restoration of the sliell-ravagcd fields. Tlic regions visiiea 
included the loitr most bitterlj' fought over in the West— 
ilandtrs, the Sommo. the- Champagne and \'crdun-- and no 
rifioner had I traversed a mUe of the lirst of them than I liad 
aU the evidence 1 needed to convince me of the " utter 
nonsense " (to use the expression of the French official I 
have quoted) of the contentions of the learned theorists who 
have so lightly condemned these blood-hallowed fields to half 
a century or so of wilderness. . i 
. There is one of the quatrauis of the Rubaiyat which begins : 
I sometimes think that never blows so red 
The Rose as whore some buried C;csar bled. ; : ; 
Old Omar Khayam never saw a battletiold after a bombard- 
ment with modern high explosives, but the fact remains that 
these hues miglit just as well be written of the Somme or 
Champagne as of the fields where the hosts of Xerxes and 
Cyrus fought and bled. Never under the hand of the 
husbandmen have the fields of Northern France brought 
fortli such a wealth of verdure as this last summer, and the 
fact that the most of this growth consisted of wild flowers 
anrl weeds was merely because notliing else had been planted 
in their stead. Trenches, used and disused, were clothed to 
their parapets in a dense mass of rank vegetation, and the 
only shell-holes which were not half-submerged in greenery 
Were those which had been formed within the month. 
The onlj' e\'idence of " j)oisoned " ground 1 saw was where 
a saffron pool — a foot or two across — had formed under 
a cracked but unexploded shell, or where the film of petroleum 
had been deposited on the grass of some undrained hollow. 
Likewise, " debilitated " ground only ajipeared where some 
sharp ridge or hill had been scoured down to the very bed- 
rock by intensive bombardment, and even then, the barren 
area \vas usually measurable in yards. That endlessly fought 
for and bombarded Butte de Warlencourt was the most 
striking example I came across of this sort of thing. That 
strange little wart on the Somme plain nnjst have had all 
twenty-five feet of its round top blown off by the thousands 
and thousands of British and German shells which were rained 
upon it in the months before the retirement to the Hinden- 
burg fine put an end to its value as the one observation post 
on the whole sector. Yet on only the last ten or fifteen feet 
of solid chalk — the bald crown of the Butte de Warlencourt 's 
de\oted hiad— has the vegetation failed to find a footing. 
The lower two or three hundred feet of slope was knee-deep 
in fraprrant verdnre, and one had to step with care to avoid 
tripj)ing in the fragments of barbed wire it concealed. 
Wealth of Wild Flowers 
And not only was it the wild flowers and weeds and other 
hardv things that were springing fresh and green, but even 
such " domestics " as had the chance were making the bravest 
of showings. In one place I saw where the seeds of the 
jietunias. snap-dragons and nasturtiums of a little old-fashioned 
garden, which had been turned over a dozen times by bursting 
shells, had sprouted, grown, and were flowering as I have 
rarely seen any of their kind flower before, even under the 
hand of a gardener. A score of tunes I walked in head-high 
patches of " volunteer " oats, wheat and barley that would 
undoubtedly have dwarfed the carefully -manured and tended 
crops which grew' there three j'ears previously, and once- 
near the site of the pig-sty of a ruined cliateau, growing from 
tlie bottom of a " Jack Johnson " hole— I saw a towering 
clump of Indian corn which :tnight well have given pause to 
a tank. 
A day on the Somme last siimmer would have been quite 
enough to convince the moiit sceptical that, if this region 
really was doomed to revert to desert, it was not going to be 
because the ground was "poisoned " or " debilitated." The 
physical problem of cultivntion is, however, quite another 
matter. I must confess thnt when I first saw the condition 
in vyhicl) the ground about Thiepval, Fricourt, Contalmaison 
1 ozieres, and a dozen other bitterly fought-for points* in the 
Somme area had been left:, I was so appalled bv the sight 
that, for the moment, I wrts inchned to share the view of the 
many who were saying thprt no practicable way ever would be 
found for puttmg it under cultivation. It did not seem quite 
so hopeless after I had seen a portion of " cleaned-up " 
l)attkfield — one which las been picked over for wire shells 
trcncli material, rifles p.nd all the rest of the flotsam and 
jetsam of battle— but it nas not until the day I met a Canadian 
officer, ^\•ho (hke mysf;lf) owned a Western ranch and had 
brokcji up new land wi th a tractor, that a practicable solution 
of the problem sugges<.-ed itself. 
" The danger from unexploded shells is practically negli- 
gible said he, " for the simple reason that a detonator that 
has failed to go off a,t the end of a five-mile or ten-mile flight 
tJirough the air is nrrt likely to be greatly disturbed by a prod 
from a plough-sharr ;. Also, the explosive in a sheU or hand- 
grenade tends to de<«norate very rapidly after burial in damn 
earth. 1 here need be no worry on that score. Neither will 
buried barb-vnre give much trouble for any. length of time. 
That which can be got hold of from the surface will be picked 
up long before the war is over, while that winch is buried out 
of sight can be pulled up — or cut off far enough down to keep 
it from fouling the plough again — as fast as it is run into, which 
will not be for more than a year or two after regular cultiva- 
tion is under way. Railroad iron, concrete fragments, corru- 
gated steel roofing and other heavy trenching material will 
have to be picked up and carted off bodily. 
The First Cultivation 
" All of this leaves," he continued, " the discovery of a 
practicable way of effecting the first rough cultivation as the 
one great problem to be solved. Once the ploughs and harrows 
and drills are able to go over the ground the smoothing 
out process will go on automatically, for the simple reason 
that earth displaced in the ordinary routine of cultivation 
always tends to work downwards i^ as gradually to obliterates 
the hollows and humps. Indeed, it is astonishing how much 
is accomplished in this direction by the erosive action of the 
elements alone. Blown dust and rain-washed silt will deposit 
a foot of earth a year in the bottom of an ordinary shell- 
hole, and the great mine crater at Pozieres must have de- 
creased twenty or thirty feet in depth — due principally to the 
sluicing down of its sides in the torrential rains — in the four- 
teen months which have elapsed since it was made. 
" Since irrigation is not practised to any extent in this part 
of France, it will not be necessary to reduce the land to any 
such a ' bilhard-table ' evenness — or even to establish ' con- 
tour ' levels — as would be imperative if we had to do with 
South Africa or California. Given a first thorough ' going 
over ' — one that will smooth the ground sufficiently to allow 
the use of the farmer's ordinary instruments of cultivation 
immediately afterwards — and the problem is solved for good 
and all ; the land itself will produce all the heavier for its 
stirring up and three or four years' rest. 
" The question then narrows down as to what sort of a 
machine will have to be devised to accomplish this preliminary 
work. I do not need to tell you that the ordinary type of 
side-wheel tractor would not progress its own length over an 
average stretch of ' crater ground,' nor that even the largest 
and most powerful ' caterpillar ' would ' stall down ' in the 
first big shell-hole and have to give up the game for good at 
the first uncaved-in line of trench. Unless the millions 
of such obstacles are to he levelled by scrapers or steam- 
shovels — at a prohibitive cost — a machine will be needed 
which can pursue the even tenor of its way straight across 
them. And right there you have the answer to those who are 
a.sking what is to be done with the thousands of tanks tliat 
will be left without ' occupation ' at the end of the war. 
Use them for tractors to draw specially-devised plows and 
harrows in the first rough cultivation of the ' crater areas.' 
■ ' The extent of the f ought-over ground which is too torn up to 
be cultivated in the ordinary way can hardly run to more than a 
few hundred square miles at ^he outside, and ten times as 
many tanks will be available as would be necessary to give 
this a complete going over in a fortnight or so. There will 
also be an ample supply of trained drivers to run them, 
though the handling of a tank is something that any man 
who can run a tractor or motor lorry can pick up in a day or 
two. The nature and design of the implements to be drawn 
would have to be determined by experiment, but there is no 
reason why these should not be initiated at once, so that 
whatever types are determined on could be built and ready for 
use at the first opportunity. Indeed, assuming that -the 
Germans are to be pushed still further back — or even held 
where they are— on the St. Ouentin-Cambrai Front, there 
is no reason why the restoration of the ' crater ' area of the 
Somme battlefield should not be taken up at any time." 
He had not, this officer concluded, given any definite thought 
to the design of the implements to be used," but, offhand, he 
thought that the prime desiderata would be an ability to 
clear up as much buried debris as possible in the process of 
cultivation, and also to exercise as a maximum levelling effect. 
Great strength and— if any difficulty was experienced on this 
score— more or less invulnerability to subterranean explosions 
— would be sine qua non. Since this meeting, however, I 
have had the good fortune to spend an evening in his com- 
pany while he was on leave in London, and the following 
tentative scheme for preparing the " crater " areas for cultiva- 
tion by means of tanks was drawn up on that occasion. 
The ground should be ready for the first " going over " 
)ust as it is left by the ordinary cleaning up work now being 
carried on, by which all of the solid materials of all kinds on 
the surface are picked up and carried away. The first imple- 
mient to be used would be a harrow of enormous strength, 
the function of which would be to rake the earth to a depth 
of a toot and a half or two feet, dragging up any buried wire 
