LITMIR.BIZ

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was astonishing, for the dead lay aligned as if on some parade.

      Montauban fell early in the day. The British lines lay in the hollow north of the Albert-Peronne road, where stands the hamlet of Carnoy. On the crest of the ridge beyond lay Montauban, now, like most Santerre villages, a few broken walls set among splintered trees. The brickfields on the right were expected to be the scene of a fierce struggle, but, to our amazement, they had been so shattered by our guns that they were taken easily. The Montauban attack was the most perfect of the episodes of the day. The artillery had done its work, and the 6th Bavarian Regiment opposed to us lost 3,000 out of a total strength of 3,500. The division which formed the British right wing advanced in parade order to a speedy success. Here is an extract from a soldier’s narrative:

      As we were going into Montauban we saw a German machine-gunner up a tree. He’d got the neatest little platform you ever saw, painted so that it was almost invisible. We shot him down, but he didn’t fall clear, and the last we saw of him he was hanging by his boots from the branches. . . . The spirit of our boys was splendid. They simply loved the show. One of them got blown up by a shell. He seemed pretty dazed, but he picked himself up and came along. All he said was, “Oh, there must be a war on after all, I suppose.”

      At that point was seen a sight hitherto unwitnessed in the campaign—the advance in line of the troops of Britain and France. On the British right lay a French Army, whose left wing was the famous “iron” Corps—the Corps which had held the Grand Couronne of Nancy in the feverish days of the Marne battle, and which by its counter-attack at Douaumont on that snowy 26th of February had turned the tide at Verdun. It was the “Division de Fer” itself which moved in line with the British—horizon-blue beside khaki, and behind both the comforting bark of the incomparable “75’s.”

      From the point of junction for eight miles southward the French advanced with lightning speed and complete success. The enemy was taken unawares. Officers were captured shaving in the dug-outs, whole battalions were rounded up, and all was done with the minimum of loss. One French regiment had two casualties; 800 was the total of one division. Long ere the evening the French were on the edge of Harde-court and Curlu, and the villages of Dompierre, Becquincourt, Bussu and Fay were in their hands. The German first position in its entirety had been captured from Mametz to Fay, a front of fourteen miles. Some 6,000 prisoners fell to the Allies, and great quantities of guns and stores. In the powdered trenches, in the woods and fields behind, and in the labyrinth of ruined dwellings the German dead lay thick. “That is the purpose of the battle,” said a French soldier. “We do not want guns, for Krupp can make them faster than we can take them. But Krupp cannot make men.”

      To walk over the captured ground was to learn a profound respect for the beaver-like industry of the German soldier. His fatigue-work must have reached the heroic scale. The old firing trenches were so badly smashed by our guns that it was hard to follow them, but what was left was good. The soil of the place is the best conceivable for digging, for it cuts like cheese, and hardens like brick in dry weather. The map shows a ramification of little red lines, but only the actual sight of that labyrinth could give a due impression of its strength. One communication trench, for example, was a tunnel a hundred yards long, lined with timber throughout, and so deep as to be beyond the reach of the heaviest shells. The small manholes used for snipers’ posts were skilfully contrived. Tunnels led to them from the trenches, and the openings were artfully screened by casual-looking debris. But the greatest marvels were the dug-outs. One at Fricourt had nine rooms and five bolt-holes; it had iron doors, gas curtains, linoleum on the floors, wallpaper and pictures on the walls, and boasted a good bathroom, electric light and electric bells. The staff which occupied it must have lived in luxury. Many of these dug-outs had two-storeys, a thirty foot staircase, beautifully furnished, leading to the first suite, and a second stair of the same length conducting to a lower storey. In such places machine-guns could be protected during any bombardment. But the elaboration of such dwellings went far beyond military needs. When the Germans boasted that their front on the West was impregnable they sincerely believed it. They thought they had established a continuing city, from which they would emerge only at a triumphant peace. The crumbling— not of their front trenches only but of their whole first position—was such a shock as King Priam’s court must have received when the Wooden Horse disgorged the Greeks in the heart of their citadel.

      It was not won without stark fighting. The Allied soldiers were quick to kindle in the fight, and more formidable figures than those bronzed steel-hatted warriors history has never seen on a field of battle. Those who witnessed the charge of the Highlanders at Loos were not likely to forget its fierce resolution. Said a French officer who was present: “I don’t know what effect it had on the Boche, but it made my blood run cold.” Our men were fighting against the foes of humanity and they did not make war as a joke. But there was none of the savagery which comes either from a half-witted militarism or from rattled nerves. The Germans had been officially told that the English took no prisoners, and this falsehood, while it made the stouter fellows fight to the death, sent scores of poor creatures huddling in dug-outs, from which they had to be extracted like shell-fish. But, after surrender, there was no brutality—very much the reverse. As one watched the long line of wounded—the “walking cases ”—straggling back from the firing line to a dressing-station, they might have been all of one side. One picture remains in the memory. Two wounded Gordon Highlanders were hobbling along, and supported between them a wounded Badener. The last seen of the trio was that the Scots were giving him water and cigarettes, and he was cutting buttons from his tunic as souvenirs for his comforters. A letter of an officer on this point is worth quoting:

      “The more I see of war the more I am convinced of the fundamental decency of our own folk. They may have a crude taste in music and art and things of that sort; they may lack the patient industry of the Boche; but for sheer goodness of heart, for kindness to all unfortunate things, like prisoners, wounded, animals and ugly women, they fairly beat the band.”

      It is the kind of tribute which most Britons would prefer to any other.

       THE FOLLOWING DAYS.

      Sunday, the 2nd of July, was a day of level heat, in which the dust stood in steady walls on every road behind the front and in the tortured areas of the captured ground. The success of the Saturday had, as we have seen, put our right well in advance of our centre, and it was necessary to bring forward the left part of the line from Thiepval to Fricourt so as to make the breach in the German position uniform over a broad enough front. Accordingly, all that day there was a fierce struggle at Ovillers and La Boisselle. At the former village we won the entrenchments before it, and late in the evening we succeeded in entering the labyrinth of cellars, the ruins of what had been La Boisselle. As yet there was no counterattack. The surprise in the south had been too great, and the Germans had not yet brought up their reserve divisions. All that day squadrons of Allied airplanes bombed depots and lines of communications in the German hinterland. The long echelons of the Allied “sausages” glittered in the sun, but only one German kite balloon could be detected We had found a way of bombing those fragile gas-bags and turning them into wisps of flame. The Fokkers strove in vain to check our airmen, and at least two were brought crashing to the earth.

      At 2 in the afternoon of Sunday Fricourt fell, the taking of Mametz and the positions won in the Fricourt Wood to the east had made its capture certain. During the night part of the garrison slipped out, but when our men entered it, bombing from house to house, they made a great haul of prisoners and guns. “Like a Belfast riot on the top of Vesuvius,” was an Irish soldier’s description of the fight. Further south the French continued their victorious progress. They destroyed a German counterattack on the new position at Hardecourt; they took Curlu; and, south of the river, they took Frise and the wood of Mereaucourt beyond it. They did more, for at many points between the river and Assevilliers they broke into the German second position.

      On Monday, July 3rd, General von Below issued an order to his troops, which showed that, whatever the German Press might say, the German soldiers had no delusion as to the gravity of the Allied offensive.

      “The decisive issue of the war depends on the victory of the 2nd Army on the Somme. We must win this battle in spite of the enemy’s

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