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[page 30]
57
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the soil here is chalk. Opposite crowning the slope are a few ragged stumps, fragments of tree trunks some 10 feet high, with bits of splintered lower branches sticking from them and this marks where Ovillers used to be. You would not know it but for the tree fragments but when you look you see that there is a quantity of broken brick and stone mixed up with the kneaded earth, and also you come to a hole in the ground which being square and lined with brick is obviously not a shell hole, but must be a cellar which once had a house above it. No village could be more destroyed because there is nothing left but a few half filled up cellars: of buildings there are none. Underground it is different. Here again the enemy had constructed elaborate dugouts to aid him in the defense of the village for he well knew the importance of making a strongpoint of a village, as possibly no type of fighting yields the number of casualties to an attacking force as does village or street fighting where every nook and cranny seems to shelter a machine gun. It was estimated that the dugouts in this village could hold, and did hold, 2.000 Germans. It is doubtless true and one fears from the smell that they hold many yet. We went down into several, though the entrances to most are battered in by shells, and groped about among the litter and darkness. One great dugout here was found to contain no less than 80 dead Germans which gave rise to the opinion that during the desperate fighting it was used as a sort of vault into which the dead were thrown with the intention sometime of wrecking the entrance and thus making a tomb for all time. The enemy's departure though was more durried [hurried] than they expected and the job was left for us to finish. Another large dugout there is which the Germans used as a dressing station. It is admirably constructed and has besides the main entrance from a trench, another