Mid-morning in september and the view of the French countryside could have been lifted from a painter's sketchbook. Wide, cultivated fields—mostly of potatoes and turnips—small farmhouses, thin rural roads, a few tree lines as well as the occasional larger woods and, in the distance, a small, tidy village where the church steeple rises cleanly above the roof line. And, also, the cemeteries. You see them everywhere you look. It doesn't seem possible that there could be another place in the world where there are so many. They are military cemeteries. The stones are lined up with precision and the grounds neatly groomed. The effect is soothing and, actually, pleasing to the eye. But the columns of stone stimulate the imagination, and you try to picture what this ground must have looked like when Robert Graves passed this way with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in July 1916.
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