The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may
topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear
and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour,
till there is nothing left but mud and dust.
Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here
has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some
"hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil's
dough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see.
Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square
miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake
between the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison
there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering
of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and
torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the
countryside.
Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of
the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course.
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