XIII THROUGH THE GERMAN SECOND LINE

1

July 15

For a little while—yes, and even now—it has seemed something rather marvellous. We have broken through the enemy’s second line; through, and beyond on a front of two and a half miles, and for the first time since October of 1914 cavalry has been in action. Men who fought in the retreat from Mons, the little remnant left, look back on the old days when the enemy’s avalanche of men swept down on them, and say, as one said to me yesterday, “Through the second line? Then we have broken the evil spell.” So it seems to men who fought in the first battle of Ypres, or in the second, and then for a year more stood in their trenches staring through loop-holes at the zig-zag of German lines, barbwired, deeply dug, fortified with redoubts, machine-gun emplacements and strong places—a great system of earthworks on high ground, nearly always on high ground, which made one grow cold to see in aeroplane photographs—supported by masses of guns which had been registered on every road and trench of ours.

To smash through that could be done at a great cost. Given a certain number of guns on a certain length of front, with hardened troops ready for a big dash, and there was no doubt that we could break the enemy’s first line, or system, as we broke through at Neuve Chapelle and at Loos. But afterwards? That was the hard thing to solve. No one on the Western front had found the formula to carry the offensive beyond the first line without coming to a dead check at a river of blood. The French troops who broke through in the Champagne fell before they reached the second line. At Loos Highlanders and Londoners swept through the first line and then, at Hill 70 and Hulluch, were faced by annihilating fire, and could go no further except to death.... But to-day we broke the second German line.

2

I had the luck to give the news to some of our men who had been wounded early in the battle. It was worth a king’s ransom to see their gladness. “Have we got through, sir?” asked an English boy, bandaged about the head and face. When I told him a great light came into his eyes, and he said “By Jove!... That’s pretty good!”

A wounded officer raised himself on a stretcher and called out to me as I passed, “Any news?... How are we doing up there?... What, right through?... Oh, splendid!” Because I had come down from the battlefield, and might know something, officers and men on the roads asked eager questions. A doctor came out of an operating theatre in a field hospital. He was very busy there with men who could not answer questions. He stood for a moment in the doorway of the tent wiping his hands on a towel.

“How’s it going? Have we broken through?”

He stared at me when I answered, as though searching for the truth in me, and said, “Sure?... I hardly thought we could do it.”

The news spread quickly behind the lines, and there has been a queer thrill in the air to-day, exciting men with the promise of victory. I think they, too, feel that an evil spell has been broken because British soldiers have broken the second German line. Their hopes run ahead of the facts.

Their imagination has visions of an immediate German rout, and the enormous patience of the French people, incredulous, after two years, of any quick ending, is not shared by some of our young officers and men, who believe that we have the enemy on the run, not remembering his third line, and fourth, and God knows how many more.

For a day, anyhow, victory has been in the air, and because it was the 14th of July, France’s day, there are flags waving everywhere, on wayside cottages and barns and across the streets of an old French town. Women and children are carrying the tricolour, and as our wounded come down in ambulances and lorries, mostly lightly-wounded men straight out of the battle, wearing German helmets on bandaged heads, waving bandaged hands, or staring out gravely, with a pain in their eyes, at the life of the roads which is theirs again, the flags flutter up to them and laughing girls cry “Merci, camarades!” and old men stand on the roadsides raising their hats to these boys of ours who have won back a mile or two more of the soil of France, and have been touched by fire.

All this is part of the emotion which belongs to war, the sentiment and the faith and the hope without which men could not fight nor women hide their tears.

But the business of war itself is different and of a grimmer kind, not admitting sentiment to those Generals of ours who have been calculating chances based upon the position of their guns, the quantity of their ammunition, their reserves of men, the enemy’s dispositions, resources and difficulties, and all the mechanics of a great battle. They have had to study human nature, too, as well as the mechanism of war. To how great a test could they put these battalions of ours, in the plan to smash the German second line? How long, for instance, could they “stick it” in Bernafay Wood and the Trones Wood? Was it possible to put in troops already tired by hard fighting? How could they be replaced by fresh troops?... a thousand problems of man-power and gun-power which must be reckoned out, without much margin of error, if all the cost of the first part of the battle—a tragic cost—were to be justified by success in the second part.

Working night and day, snatching a little sleep and a little food at odd hours, in constant touch with telephones whispering messages from headquarters, batteries, battalion commanders in the field, receiving reports of local successes and local failures of German counter-attacks, of German reinforcements in guns and men, our divisional Generals and Brigadiers, keeping in touch with Corps Generals and Army Generals, had to prepare for the second big blow. It would have to be quick and hard.

3

There had been a whole fortnight’s fighting since the great attack was launched on the First of July, and it had been very desperate fighting. On the left from Hebuterne down to Beaumont-Hamel the heroic self-sacrifice of great numbers of men had not been rewarded by success. That side of the German fortress lines had remained standing—broken in places, but not carried nor held after the first bloody assaults.

The enemy had concentrated his defensive strength at that part of the line, believing the main attack was to be delivered there, and it was one vast redoubt crammed with machine-guns which scythed down battalions of our men as they advanced with incomparable valour. Further south the stronghold of Ovillers was not yet taken, though almost surrounded, and penetrated by bodies of grenadiers bombing their way into the quarries and cellars.

It was through the southern bastion of the German fortress-position that our troops had stormed their way, and in fourteen days of hard stubborn fighting they had struggled forward up the high ground from the Fricourt ridge to the Montauban ridge. In my despatches I have endeavoured to record the narrative of these daily battles, and to give some faint idea of the wonderful courage and tenacity of our men, who captured Contalmaison and lost it and captured it again under terrible storms of fire, who went forward to the Battle of the Woods, fighting for every yard of the way in Bailiff Wood on the left, and Trones Wood on the right, and Mametz Wood in the centre, with little copses of naked tree-trunks round about, into which the enemy hurled his high explosives.

Wave after wave of splendid men went up. Not one of these places was won easily. The spirit of our race, all the steel in it, all the fire in its blood, was needed to gain the ground swept by machine-guns and ploughed by shells. There were hours when men of weaker stock would have despaired and yielded. But these men of ours would not be beaten. Fresh waves of them went to get back in the morning what had been lost at night, or at night what had been lost by day because of the fire which had destroyed those who had gone up first. And every day they made a little progress, thrusting forward an advance post here, winning a new bit of wood there, bombing the Germans back from ground we needed for a new advance.

There was not a man among all our men who had any misunderstanding as to the purpose of the struggle. I have spoken to hundreds of them, and all knew that it was “up to them,” as they say, to push on to the second German line so that other men could break it. I know that many of these men, quite simple fellows, felt individually that upon his single courage, his last bit of pushful strength, his last stumble over a yard of earth towards that second German line, depended, as far as one man’s strength tells, the success of the great attack. It was this spirit which made them shout “No surrender!” when surrender would have been an easy way of escape, and “stick it” in places of infernal horror. I write the plain unvarnished truth.

It was when Contalmaison—the Stronghold of the Woods—was finally and securely taken, when Mametz Wood and Bailiff Wood were mostly ours, and when our positions were strengthened at Montauban with some footing in Trones Wood, that the attack upon the second German line became possible. It was for that moment that our generals were now waiting and preparing. Men were there who had fought long in the Ypres salient, hardened to every phase of trench warfare, and men who had won great honour in the Loos salient, and men, all of them, who had the spirit of attack.

I watched them passing along the roads towards the front, saw old friends in their ranks, and knew, as I looked, that in all the world there are not more splendid soldiers. Hardened by a long campaign, bronzed to the colour of their belts, marching with most perfect discipline, these handsome, clean-cut men went into the battlefield whistling as on the first day of the battle their comrades had gone singing, though they knew that in a few hours it would be hell for them. As I watched them pass something broke in my heart so that I could have wept silly tears. There were other men, harder than I, who were stirred by the same emotion, and cursed the war.

4

The attack was to begin before the dawn. Behind the lines, as I went up to the front in the darkness, the little villages of France were asleep. It was a night of beauty, very warm and calm, with a moon giving a milky light to the world. Clouds trailed across it without obscuring its brightness, and there was only one star visible—a watchful eye up there looking down upon the battlefields.

The whitewashed walls of cottages and barns appeared out of great gulfs of shadow, and trees on high ground above the fields were cut black against the moonlight. Warm scents of hay and moist earth, and new-baked bread, and the acrid smell of French farmyards came upon the air. Further forward there was still great quietude along the roads, but here and there long supply columns and ambulance convoys loomed black under the trees.

The ambulances were empty before the battle. For several miles only one figure stood at every cross-road. It was the figure of Christ on a wayside Calvary. Sentries gave their challenge, as on the first night of battle, and presently I saw other soldiers about in the dark entries of French courtyards, their bayonets shining like a streak of light, and officers standing together with whispered consultations, and, along side roads men marching.

A long column of them came to a halt to let our car pass, and I looked into the men’s eyes. There was a young officer there whose face I should know if I saw him again in the world, because it was in the rays of a lantern, and had a white light on it. He had the look of Lancelot.

The men were very quiet. Very quiet also were camps of men and horses in fields dipping down to hollows where a few lanterns twinkled, and presently quite close to the edge of the battlefields I passed great columns of horse-gunners and horse transport and cavalry with their lances up, and Indian native cavalry, still as statues. The men were drawn up along the side of the road, and their figures were utterly black in the darkness between an old millhouse and some other buildings. Except for one man who was humming a tune, they were quite silent, and they hardly stirred in their saddles. They seemed to be waiting, with some grim expectation.

The road was lined with trees which made a tunnel with its foliage, and at one end of the tunnel which showed a patch of sky, there were strange lights flashing, like flaming swords cutting through the darkness. We went up towards the lights and towards a monstrous tumult of noise, and walked straight across country towards the centre of a circle of fire which was all around us. Our artillery was smashing the German line.

5

I described, perhaps at too great length, the bombardment on the night before the 1st of July. Then it seemed to me that nothing could be more overwhelming to one’s soul and senses. But this was worse—more wonderful and more terrible. As I stumbled over broken ground and shell holes, and got caught in coils of wire, a cold sweat broke out upon me, and for a little while I was horribly afraid. It was not fear for myself. It was just fear, the fear that an animal may have when the sky is full of lightning—a sensuous terror. The hell of war encircled us, and its waves of sound and light beat upon us.

Our batteries were firing with an intense fury. The flashes of them were away back behind us—where the heavies have their hiding places—and over all the ground in front of our new line of attack. They came out of the black earth with short, sharp stabs of red flame whose light filled the hollows with pools of fire. And the sky and the ridges of ground and the earthworks and ruins and woods across our lines were blazing with the flashes of bursting shells. Blinding light leapt about like a will o’ the wisp. For a second it lit up all the horizon over Contalmaison, and gave a sudden picture, ghastly white, of the broken château with stumps of trees about it. Then it was blotted out by a great blackness, and instantly shifted to Mametz Wood or to Montauban, revealing their shapes intensely and the shells crashing beyond them, until they, too, disappeared with the click of a black shutter. A moment later and Fricourt was filled with white brilliance, so that every bit of its ruin, its hideous rummage of earth, its old mine-craters, and its plague-stricken stumps of trees were etched upon one’s eyes. Along the German second line by Bazentin-le-Grand, Bazentin-le-Petit, and Longueval, at the back of the woods, our shells were bursting without a second’s pause and in great clusters. They tore open the ground and let out gusts of flames. Flame fountains rose and spread from the German trenches above Pearl Wood. The dark night was rent with all these flames, and hundreds of batteries were feeding the fires.

Every calibre of gun was at work. The heavy shells, 15-inch, 12-inch, 8-inch, 6-inch, 4.7, came overhead like flocks of birds—infernal birds with wings that beat the air into waves and came whining with a shrill high note, and stooped to earth with a monstrous roar. The lighter batteries, far forward, were beating the devil’s tattoo, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, with sharp knocks that clouted one’s ears. I sat on a wooden box on the top of an old dug-out in the midst of all this fury. There was a great gun to my left, and every time it fired it shook the box, and all the earth underneath, with a violent vibration.

The moon disappeared soon after 3 o’clock, and no stars were to be seen. But presently a faint ghost of dawn appeared. The white earth of the old, disused trenches about me became visible. A lark rose and sang overhead. And at 3.30 there was a sudden moment of hush. It was the lifting of the guns, and the time of attack. Over there in the darkness by Mametz Wood and Montauban thousands of men, the men I had seen going up, had risen to their feet, and were going forward to the second German line, or to the place where death was waiting for them, before the light came.

6

The light came very quickly. It was strange what a difference a few minutes made. Very faintly, but steadily, the dawn crept through the darkness, revealing the forms of things and a little colour in the grass. The sandbags at my feet whitened. Over at Ovillers there were clouds of smoke, and from its denseness red and white rockets shot up and remained in the sky for several seconds. Other rockets, red and white and green, rose to the right of Contalmaison towards Bazentin-le-Grand. Our infantry was advancing.

A new sound came into the general din of gun-fire. It was a kind of swishing noise, like that of flames in a strong wind. I knew what it meant.

“Enemy machine-guns,” said an artillery observer, who had just come out of his hole in the ground. There must have been many of them to make that noise.

Our own artillery had burst out into a new uproar. I could see our shells bursting further forward, or thought I could.

“I believe our men are getting on,” said an officer, staring through his glasses.

The gunner observer had one eye to a telescope.

“There’s too much mist about. And, anyhow, one can’t make out the confusion of battle. It’s always hopeless. And what the devil is that light?”

“Must be a signal,” said the gunner officer. “I think I’d better report it.”

He put his head into the dug-out, and spoke to a man sitting by a telephone.

At 3.55 the light was clear enough for one to see German shrapnel, very black and thick, between Mametz Wood and Bazentin Wood. High explosives were bursting there too. The enemy had got his guns to work upon our infantry.

At 4 o’clock there was a humming sound overhead, and I looked up and saw the first aeroplane flying towards the German lines, just as I had seen one on the first day of battle. It flew very low—no more than 500 ft. high—and went very steadily on towards the furnace, brave moth!

At 4.10 there was a red glow to the right of Montauban. It rose with a pulsing light and spread upwards—a great torch with sparks dancing over it.

“By Jove!” said one of the men near me. “That’s Longueval on fire!”

In a little while there was no doubt about it. I could see the sharp edge of broken buildings in the heart of the red glow. The village of Longueval was in flames.

From behind the north-west corner of Mametz Wood a great rosy light rose like a cloud in the setting sun, but more glowing at its base. It died out three times and rose again, vividly, and then appeared no more. The gunner observer was bothered again. Was it a signal or an explosion? With so many lights and flames about it was difficult to tell.

At about 4.30 I heard another furious outburst of machine-gun fire in the direction of Longueval, and it seemed to spread westwards along Bazentin-le-Grand and Bazentin-le-Petit. I strained my eyes to see any of our infantry, but dense clouds of smoke were rolling over the ground past Contalmaison and between Mametz and Bazentin woods. It seemed as if we were putting up a smoke barrage there, and later a great volume of smoke hid the ground by Montauban.

The enemy’s artillery was now firing with great violence. Enormous shell-bursts flung up the earth along the line of our advance, and the black shrapnel smoke was hanging heavily above. It seemed to me that some of their guns were firing wildly and blindly. High explosives burst down below Fricourt, where there was nothing to hurt, and in places far afield. The German gunners had got the wind up, as soldiers say, and now that darkness had gone and daylight come our men must have gone far ahead, if luck was theirs. Had they broken the second German line? Men waiting for any news of them found the strain of ignorance intolerable.... What were they doing up there?

7

The first men to come back from the battle were the wounded. They were the lightly wounded, or at least men who could walk. They came across the fields in twos and threes at first, or alone, single limping figures, at a slow pace. But after an hour or two they came in a straggling procession from the first-aid dressing stations up in the lines—men with bandaged heads, men with their arms in slings, men with wounded feet, so that they could only hop along with an arm round a comrade’s neck.

Some of them were all blood-stained, with blood on their faces and hands and clothes. Others had their uniforms torn to tatters, and there were men who were bare almost to the waist, with a jacket slung over one shoulder. There was hardly a man among them who wore his steel helmet, though some carried them slung to the rifle, and others wore German helmets and German caps. Ambulances were waiting for them, and the stretcher-bearers were busy with the bad cases. The stretcher-bearers had done their duty as gallantly as the fighting men, and some of their own comrades were among the wounded.

But they had been reinforced by men who do not belong to the R.A.M.C. Some of the stretchers were being carried by men in grey uniforms with flat round caps, who walked stolidly looking about them, at all those British soldiers, and at those fields on the British side, with curious eyes as though everything were strange to them. They were German prisoners paying for the privilege of life, and glad to pay.

Later in the day there came down a long column of these men, not carrying stretchers, but marching shoulder to shoulder, under armed escort. There were over 700 of them in this one convoy, as a living proof that the day had gone well for British arms. They were tall, sturdy men for the most part, and in spite of their ordeal by fire most of them looked in good physical health, though haggard and hollow-eyed and a little dazed. There was a number of wounded among them who dragged wearily by the side of their luckier friends, but those who were badly hurt travelled with our own wounded, and I saw several of them on the lorries with their hands on the shoulders of men who had gone out to kill them.

So the backwash of battle came down like a tide, but long before then I knew that we had broken the second German line and that our men were fighting on the high ground beyond. The village of Longueval was ours. Bazentin-le-Grand, both wood and village, and Bazentin-le-Petit, were ours. A gallant body of men had swept through Trones Wood, on the extreme right of the line, and patrols were pushing into Delville Wood and towards the highest ridge behind the broken German trenches. On the left our men had swept up and beyond Contalmaison Villa, which stands far north of the village.

Every objective of the attack had been carried and our losses were not enormously heavy. The German lines had been captured on a front of nearly three miles—and the cavalry was going in.

Scottish troops were amongst those who went first into Longueval—men belonging to famous old regiments—and they fought very grimly, according to the spirit of their race, with their blood set on fire by the music of the pipes that went with them. Before the light of dawn came, and when our guns lifted forward, they rose from the ground just north of Montauban and went forward across No Man’s Land towards the German trenches. They had to make a distance of 1,200 yards over open ground and came at once under heavy shell-fire and an enfilade fire from machine-guns.

The enemy also used smoke bombs, and the ground was ploughed with high explosives. A number of men fell, but the others went forward shouting and reached the German line. In some parts the wire had not been cut by our bombardment, but the Highlanders hurled themselves upon it and beat their way. Machine-guns were pattering bullets upon their ranks, but not for long. The men poured through and surged in waves into and across the German trenches. Every man among them was a grenadier, provided with bombs and with supplies coming up behind. It was with the bomb, the most deadly weapon of this murderous war for close combat, that the men fought their way through. The German soldiers defended themselves with their own hand grenades when their machine-guns had been knocked out in the first line trenches, but as they sprang out of their dug-outs when the bombardment lifted and our men were upon them they had but a poor chance of life unless they were quick to surrender. I hear that these trenches in the second German line were not deeply dug, and that the dug-outs themselves were hardly bomb-proof.

For once in a way the enemy had been lazy and over-confident, and he paid now a bitter price for his pride in believing that the first line was impregnable. I do not care to write about this part of the fighting. It was bloody work, and would not be good to read. One incident was told me by a kilted sergeant as he lay wounded. From one of the dug-outs came a German officer. He had a wild light in his eyes, and carried a great axe.

“I surrender,” he said, in good English.

And in broad Scotch the sergeant told him that if he had an idea of surrendering it would be a good and wise thing to drop his chopper first. But the German officer swung it high, and it came like a flash past the sergeant’s head. Like a flash also a bayonet did its work.

8

While men were “cleaning up” the dug-outs in the first-line trenches other men pressed on and stormed their way into Longueval village. The great fires there which I had seen in the darkness had died down, and there was only the glow and smoulder of them in the ruins. But machine-guns were still chattering in their emplacements.

In one broken building there were six of them firing through holes in the walls. It was a strong redoubt sweeping the ground, which had once been a roadway and was now a shambles. Scottish soldiers rushed the place and flung bombs into it until there was no more swish of bullets but only the rising of smoke-clouds and black dust. Longueval was a heap of charred bricks above ground, but there was still trouble below ground, before it was firmly taken. There were many cellars in which Germans fought like wolves at bay. And down in the darkness of these places men fought savagely, seeing only the glint of each other’s eyes, and feeling for each other’s throats, unless there were still bombs handy to make a quicker ending. It was primitive warfare. The cave-men fought like that, in such darkness, though not with bombs, which belong to our age in this Christian era of grace and civilisation.

To the right of Longueval and south of the second German line lies the Trones Wood, and as it was on the right flank of our attack it could not be left in the enemy’s hands. We had held most of it once, a few days ago, and for a few hours, but the enemy’s shell-fire had made the place untenable. It was into that fire that some of our English battalions advanced yesterday morning from Bernafay Wood. “They shelled us like hell,” said a boy who came from a quiet place in Sussex before he knew what hell is like.

There were machine-guns sweeping the southern end of the woods with cross-fire, and with bursting shells overhead it was a place of black horror in the night. But these English boys kept crawling on to gain a yard or two before the next crash came, and then another yard or two, and at last they came up to the German line, and flung themselves suddenly upon German machine-gunners and German riflemen sheltered behind earthworks and trunks of trees.... The wood was captured again, and then a queer kind of miracle happened, and it seemed as if those who had been dead had come to life again. For out of holes in the ground, and from behind the fallen timbers of shelled trees, came a number of English boys, dirty and wild-looking, who shouted out, “Hullo, lads!” and “What cheer, matey?” or just shouted and laughed with a sob in their throats and big tears down their grimy faces. They were West Kents, who had first taken the Trones Wood and then had been caught in a barrage of fire. With one officer 300 men had dug themselves into the roots of trees on the eastern edge of the wood and kept the Germans at bay with a machine-gun.

9

Meanwhile a number of battalions, mostly English, but with some Scots—men who have done as well in this war since the early days of it as any troops who have fought in France—were attacking the line between Longueval and the two Bazentins. They, too, found the wire uncut in places, but they went through in a tearing hurry, hating the machine-gun fire and resolved to end it quickly. They stormed the German trenches and fought down them with bombs and bayonets. German soldiers came out of the dug-outs and begged for mercy. They came holding out their watches, their pocket-books, their helmets, anything that they thought would ransom their lives, and when they had been taken prisoners they made no trouble about carrying back the English wounded, but were glad to go. It was all in the darkness, except when shell-bursts lit the ground, and some of our battalions lost their sense of direction towards Bazentin Woods. Prisoners acted as guides to their own lines. Five or six of them unwillingly led the way back. A British officer of nineteen, a boy who had only been in France a month or two, led one of the companies forward because his brother officers had fallen.

“Come on, lads!” he shouted, “I’m only a kid, but I’ll show you the way all right.”

They liked those words, “only a kid,” and laughed at them.

“He’s a plucked ’un, he is,” said one of the men who followed him. They went after him into Bazentin Wood, and others followed on, into and through a heavy barrage of fire.

So it was on the left, where other battalions were at work pressing forward in waves to Contalmaison Villa and the ground beyond. The second German line had fallen before our men, and they were over it and away.

10

It was at about 6 o’clock in the evening that some British cavalry came into action. They were the men whom I had seen on my way up to the battlefield, a small detachment of the Dragoon Guards and also of the Deccan Horse. They worked forward with our infantry on a stretch of country between Bazentin Wood and Delville Wood, rising up to High Wood (Foureaux Wood), and then rode out alone in reconnaissance, in true cavalry formation, with the commander in the rear. Lord! Not one in a thousand would have believed it possible to see this again. When they passed, the infantry went a little mad, and cheered wildly and joyously, as though these men were riding on a road of triumph.

So they rode on into open country, skirting Delville Wood. Presently a machine-gun opened fire upon them. It was in a cornfield, with German infantry, and the officer in command gave the word to his men to ride through the enemy. The Dragoons put their lances down and rode straight into the wheat. They killed several men and then turned and rode back, and charged again, among scattered groups of German infantry. Some of them prepared to withstand the charge with fixed bayonets. Others were panic-stricken and ran forward crying “Pity! Pity!” and clung to the saddles and stirrup leathers of the Dragoon Guards. Though on a small scale, it was a cavalry action of the old style, the first on the Western front since October of the first year of the war.

With thirty-two prisoners our men rode on slowly still reconnoitring the open country on the skirt of Delville Wood, until they came again under machine-gun fire and drew back. As they did so an aeroplane came overhead, skimming very low, at no more than 300ft. above ground. The cavalry turned in their saddles to stare at it for a moment or two, believing that it was a hostile machine. But no bullets came their way, and in another moment it stooped over the German infantry concealed in the wheat and fired at them with a machine-gun. Four times it circled and stooped and fired, creating another panic among the enemy, and then it flew off, leaving the cavalry full of admiration for this daring feat. They could ride no further, owing to the nature of the ground, and that night they dug themselves in. German guns searched in vain for them, and the cavalry to-night is full of pride, believing with amazing optimism that their day may come again. [It was after all only a “fancy stunt” as soldiers call it, and it seems certain now that the cavalry is an obsolete arm of war on the Western front. The Tanks have taken their place.]

The scene all through the afternoon behind the battle-lines and down in little villages beyond the reach of guns will stay in my mind as historic pictures. Numbers of wounded men—with a very high proportion of lightly wounded among them—arrived at the casualty clearing stations and, while they waited their turn for the doctors and nurses, lay about the grass, fingering their souvenirs—watches, shell-fuses, helmets, pocket-books, German letters, and all manner of trophies—and telling their adventures in that wild battle of the night.

They seemed to have no sense of pain, and not one man groaned, in spite of broken arms and head wounds and bayonet thrusts. Every dialect of England and Scotland and Ireland could be heard among them. There were men from many battalions, and as they lay there talking or smoking or sleeping in the sunlight, other processions came down in straggling columns, limping and holding on to comrades, hobbling with sticks, peering through blood-stained rags, tired and worn and weak, but with a spirit in them that was marvellous.