Wandering through the Newfoundland Memorial in the Beaumont-Hamel area of the Somme – a site where 733 members of a Canadian regiment were killed on July 1, 1916 – produces a distanced but evocative understanding of the experience of trench warfare. Closely shorn grass covers the battlefield now, but it follows the contours of a landscape that is still alien in its shape. The tended ground eerily recalls Carl Sandburg’s war poem, “Grass”: “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. / Shovel them under and let me work – / I am the grass; I cover all.” 1 Under this superficial cover of green, the pockmarked land bears witness to the massive destruction that took place a century ago. Hills that would have seemed innocuous or even picturesque have become ominous monuments to the strategic disadvantages of the Canadian position.