the very boots of the men stuck in it
and had often to be wrenched off."
A young Company Commander likened
the churned-up ground soaked with
drenching rains to "porridge with
syrup over it." It appeared to him
"as though cartloads of it had been
dropped from the sky by giants
spilt porridge."

During this same time, British troops
from Montauban were co-operating
with their allies around Hardecourt.
While the French approached the town
from the south and took it, the British
carried on a hot and desperate struggle
for T rones Wood, northwest of Harde-
court. Day and night they waged
fierce battle in an area so raked by
artillery fire from both sides that
neither could establish a base there.
There were numerous counter-attacks
in which the enemy lost hundreds of
men, but his position behind the wood
gave him the opportunity of pouring
in reinforcements until they might be
urgently called for on other parts of
the front.

\ SUMMARY OF THE FRENCH ADVANCE.

South of the Somme, the French had
reached and occupied, on July 9,
Biaches, separated from Peronne by
only the river and its marshes. Then,
fighting on through the night and early
morning, they reached and took the
high ridges occupied by the Maison-
ette estate, which overlooked Peronne,
commanding railroad stations and
neighboring roadways. General Fa-
yolle's army had now advanced over
ground to a depth of six and a half
miles upon a ten-mile front. In some
places they had penetrated to the



German third position. Some 12,000
men, beside 236 officers, had been
captured, and 85 guns with a great
quantity of other war material taken,
by the French alone.

THE GERMAN FIRST LINE BROKEN ON A
WIDE FRONT.

Sir Douglas Haig's report stated:
"Our troops have completed the meth-
odical capture of the enemy's first
system of defense on a front of 14,000
yards." This had been accomplished
by steadily working on "from wood to
wood and from ruined village to ruined
village." About 22,000 German prison-
ers had been captured, and tens of
thousands of the enemy had fallen.
The British losses were terribly heavy,
especially those of the first attack.
An entire disregard for danger prob-
ably increased the number even be-
yond what was necessary and un-
avoidable.

An abomination of desolation lay
behind the advancing armies in un-
recognizable heaps and masses that
had once had form and beauty and
human interest. Seen from the air, the
battle area seemed a desert place, up-
heaved and churned, and pitted with
deep hollows as if some mammoth
birds had settled there, shaping for
themselves huge nesting-places with
rim touching rim. The trenches were
but long, straggling scratches such as
might have been drawn by a gigantic
finger through the crumbled, arid sur-
face. Where a mine or a large shell
exploded, a monstrous geyser spouted
high a mass of earth and fragments
tossing upward to fall back in new
heaps of horror and ruin. And all
about along the miles of battle-front
puffs and clouds of smoke broke out
and drifted and dissipated always
renewed from moment to moment.

*-pHE STORY OF AN OLD WOMAN'S TWO
1 LITTLE FIELDS.

Only the men who had lived and
struggled in that tormented region
could realize fully the extent of its
torture and transformation. The story
of two little fields, whose owner, an
old blacksmith's wif.e, was overjoyed
by their recovery, is sketched in an
officer's letter:



HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR



"Think," he writes, "what those
fields must have been in the spring of
1914, and what they are today, every
yard of them torn by shells, burrowed
through and through by old trenches
and dugouts; think of the hundreds of
tons of wire, sand-bags, timber, gal-
vanized iron, duck-boards, revetting
stuff, steel, iron, blood and sweat, the
rum jars, bully-beef tins, old trench
boots, field dressings, cartridge cases,
rockets, wire stanchions and stakes,
gas gongs, bomb boxes, S. A. A. cases,

broken canteens, bits of uni- ,

forms, and buried soldiers, and
Boches all in the old lady's
two little fields."

THE SECOND STAGE OF THE
GREAT BATTLE.

With no really perceptible
pause for preparation, the sec-
ond stage of the great battle
was launched. The work of
clearing up the positions in
Mametz Wood, around Contal-
maison and in Trones Wood
went hand in hand with the
work of preparing the attack
upon the German second line,
which lay a little above and
beyond, stretching in front of
Pozieres, Bazentin - le - Petit,
Bazentin-le-Grand, Longueval
and Guillemont. From July II,



who led the advance across the long
stretch of No Man's Land north of
Montauban was echoed by the skirling
of the pipers on the Champs Elysee.

'-pHE BOMBARDMENT BECOMES EVEN
1 MORE FURIOUS.

Before dawn on the fourteenth, the
bombardment reached its highest de-
velopment, even outdoing the earlier
demonstrations, impressive as they had
been. The correspondent of The
Times, Mr. Robinson, says of it:

" It was a thick night, the sky veiled



SOME SOUVENIRS FROM GERMAN TRENCHES,
JULY, 1916



the artillery fire was violent and spas- in mottled and hurrying clouds,

modic along the whole line; and toward through which only one planet shone

the end of the bombardment gas and serene and steadily, high up in the

smoke attacks were made in the sec- eastern sky. But the wonderful and

tion north of the Ancre, although the appalling thing was the belt of flame

British front of attack in the new which fringed a great arc of the horizon

effort was to be limited to the four or before us. It was not, of course, a

five miles between Pozieres and the steady flame, but it was one which

Wood of Delville. There not a mo- never went out, rising and falling,

ment was lost in the brief space flashing and flickering, half dimmed



allowed for preparation.



with its own smoke, against which the



On July 14, the one hundred twenty- stabs and jets of fire of the bursting

seventh anniversary of the Fall of the shells flared out intensely white or

Bastille, while Paris was celebrating dully orange. Out of it all, now here,

in an unprecedented fashion, with now there, rose like fountains the great

troops of all the Allies marching in balls of star shells and signal lights

procession amid cheering crowds, the theirs or ours white and crimson and

armies of the British Empire on the green. The noise of the shells was

Somme battlefield were shouting for terrific, and when the guns nearest to

France as they executed their "Great us spoke not only the air but the earth

4 do' " on France's own great festival beneath us shook. . . .
day. The skirling of the Scottish pipers "Far off to the right the shimmering

525



HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR



in the sky told us where the beautiful
French guns were busy. On the left
the region of Ovillers-la-Boisselle was
like a volcano in eruption. But it was
on the ground immediately before us
that the chief interest centred, for
there, between 3 o'clock and 3:30, the
great attempt was to be made."

THE EFFECT OF THE FIRE ON THE GER-
MAN LINES.

The effective service of the artillery
was realized by the men who followed
the guidance of its storming cloud into
the German lines and found trenches
demolished, walls pulverized (as at
Bazentin-le-Grand where 2000 shells
or more were dropped in the last 20
minutes) and dugout entrances sealed
with wreckage. The telephone, the
indispensable auxiliary of every bat-
tery, guided the fire, whether the mes-
sages came from balloons far overhead
or from operators pushing forward in
the assault and unrolling reels of wire
as they went. A French officer states
that by the middle of July there were
12,420 miles of telephone wire in use
in the Army of the Somme, and at
least 1000 operators at work. As for
the field artillery, a Lance-Corporal of
a Yorkshire Regiment gives evidence
of their activity. "Some of their guns,"
he declares, "were right up behind us,
when we were in the fourth line. Their
teams stood ready and they limbered
up like lightning and were after us,
racing over trenches and communica-
tion trenches, as if they were on a high
road."

In the hour before daybreak on that
unnatural morning of July, while a
lark's song drifted down in intervals
between the din of gun voices and a
quail called from the fields behind the
battle-lines, the attack broke forth.
Just before 3:30 the men went over the
lines that had so short a time been
theirs, to claim others farther up the
slopes before them. With the first
signs of light, aeroplanes moved across
in the same direction and kite balloons
began to rise, to furnish eyes for the
advancing host. The enemy's shells fell
thick and furious, but most of them
fell behind the forward-hastening fig-
ures they would have halted.

526



THE CAPTURE OF BAZENTIN-LE-PETIT
WOOD.

On the southern edges of the main
ridge that still rose before the British
Armies stood the villages, Bazentin-le-
Petit and Bazentin-le-Grand, each with
its attendant woodland. Farther east
was Longueval, engulfed in Delville
Wood. In the central background,
rather "out of the picture" at first,
because a mile behind the German line,
the Bois des Foureaux (known as High
Wood) crowned the loftiest crest of the
ridge. Fighting through the woods
where the enemy had established him-
self so firmly with trenches, dugouts,
wire protections, and machine guns,
was exhausting and precarious busi-
ness. One bad feature was the great
difficulty of removing the wounded.
But there was no hesitation about
dashing into the woods and setting
about the task of clearing them.
Bazentin-le-Petit Wood, for instance,
we are told, was "spanned at intervals
by three successive lines of trenches,
each with its separate wire protection.
. . . The men waited in one trench
while our guns from far behind them
pounded the next, then pushed and
staggered forward as soon as the guns
had lifted, while the artillery went to
the next. Then the process was re-
peated."

In this way they were three hours
working through the wood, which was
full of Germans. Among the 300
prisoners taken was a colonel who had
sworn to "stay in the wood and hold
it to the last." He was found "hold-
ing" it, in a dug-out at the bottom of
two flights of stairs, each of which
went down twenty feet.

THE HIGHLANDERS TAKE LONGUEVAL,
HOUSE BY HOUSE.

The nearest villages, the two Bazen-
tins, were entered immediately and in
Longueval the ammunition stores and
dumps were set on fire in less than an
hour after the assault had started.
Far on the right flank, a new attempt
upon T rones Wood was aided by the
firm stand of a little group of less than
two hundred of the Royal West Kents,
who, separated from their battalion the
day before, had fortified a position and



HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR



held it all night. At last, by the even-
ing of the fourteenth, the Wood of
Trones was cleared.

It was a band of Highlanders who
followed their pipers across the long
stretch northeast of Montauban, nearly
a mile, to charge the trenches of Lon-
gueval. They fought their way through
the wire entang ements, which here
had been less injured by artillery fire



Deccan Horse. After eighteen months,
cavalry were able again to take some-
part in the fighting. Moving from
Bazentin-le-Grand by way of a shallow
valley, they came out among the corn-
fields at the bottom of High Wood, and,
attacking both from on foot and on
horseback, they disposed of the Ger-
man infantry among the corn before
taking up a position from which to




KILTIES CARRYING A KETTLE OF "HOTCHPOTCH"

These members of a fatigue party belonging to a Scotch regiment are making their way through the tossed and
tumbled debris of a village in Picardy, bearing to their fellows in the trenches refreshment in the form of a kettle
of their native stew, which it is to be hoped will have a homelike taste.



than in other places. They fought
through the cellars where the Germans
were caught like "trapped animals."
They stormed the strong redoubt that
had been fitted in where Longueval and
Delville Wood conjoined. And at last
they worked around to link up with
the English infantry in Trones Wood.

^pWO REGIMENTS OF CAVALRY TAKE PART
1 IN THE FIGHTING.

By afternoon of that first day, High
Wood was no longer in the background.
The enemy's third position had been
reached there by a division which was
accompanied by two regiments of
cavalry, the Dragoon Guards and the



protect their own advancing infantry.
By evening, the German second line
trenches had been secured on a front
of about three miles, from Bazentin-le-
Petit to Longueval; and by the end of
the first twenty-four hours over 2000
prisoners had been taken.

THE SOUTH AFRICANS BEGIN TO CLEAR
DELVILLE WOOD.

The Scottish victors at Longueval
set about extending and consolidating
their position, fortifying certain useful
points, in spite of a severe shelling
with all kinds of projectiles and ex-
plosives, including gas and lachryma-
tory shells. On July 15, a brigade of

527



HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR



South Africans passed through, to
begin the difficult work of clearing up
Delville Wood (soon known as "Devil's
Wood"). For the next three days the
South Africans went on with their task
so doggedly and with such sp'rit that
we are assured, "no mortal troops
could have fought with more gallantry
and stubbornness than the South
Africans at Delville Wood." But the
utterly destructive and withering bom-
bardment flung upon the new British
lines from German guns on the morn-
ing of the eighteenth made the posi-
tions in the wood untenable, especially
when parties of infantry with machine-
guns and rifles pushed down through
from the northern part of Longueval.
Dropping back as far as the Scottish
trenches, the South Africans helped to
hold the reserve line there against the
vigorous attack of the enemy. To-
gether, the spent and exhausted forces
rallied for a counter-attack which
drove back the body of fresh German
troops and saved the line forming on
the newly taken front. "Shell-shocked
and wounded, sound or hurt, these men
who had had four sleepless days and
nights of continuous effort and fighting,
somehow went forward. Unfortunately,
one can get accounts of it only from men
who were in it and they, being Scots-
men, mostly will say very little. But it
must have been such a sight as is not
often seen in war."



IN HIGH WOOD RESIST FOR
\_J TWO MONTHS.

Reinforcements were strengthening
the German lines considerably from
day to day. Among others came the
Fifth Brandenburg Division, a corps
d'elite. But the New Army was prov-
ing itself able to meet the best of them.
Back in Delville Wood the fighting
went on desperately for nearly two
weeks. And at High Wood, though the
German counter-attacks on the six-
teenth forced a withdrawal of the
troops whose temporary hold had been
valuable in furnishing a screen for the
lines behind as they were getting
settled and consolidated, the struggle
continued for two months. The Ger-
mans had connected by a "switch"
line their third position with that por-

528



tion of their second position which they
still held. This, in turn, became an
object of attack and contest, forming
as it did, "the backbone of the enemy's
defenses" between the British and the
summit of the ridge. The day after
the great attack was one of extra-
ordinary success for the airmen, who
within twenty-four hours had brought
down four Fokkers, three biplanes, and
a double-engined plane, with no loss to
themselves.

The part of the German second line
between Pozieres and Bazentin-le-
Petit had not been included in the
attack of July 14, although it had
undergone a series of intense bombard-
ments which continued until the morn-
ing of the sixteenth. The result of the
attack that followed was the capture
of the first and second lines of German
trenches up to a distance of about five
hundred yards from Pozieres, w r ithin
reach of the fire of the guns there.
From the west and south the right
wing of the Fifth Army was slowly
and gradually working toward Pozieres.
Ovillers-la-Boisstlle had been for days
the centre of siege. A remnant of its
garrison, members of the Third Prus-
sian Guard, were finally so closely
pressed by their attacking foes that
the British batteries could no longer
fire upon them for fear of hitting their
own men. The struggle in Ovillers then
became one of bombs and machine-
guns, with a barrage of shell dropping
steadily between the garrison and their
own lines.

THE THIRD PRUSSIAN GUARD AT OVIL-
LERS-LA-BOISSELLE.

Cut off from supplies and reinforce-
ments, they still did not yield but
fought on through tortures of hunger
and thirst, taking refuge, between
bombing raids, in the vaults and cel-
lars amid the horrible ruin in which
they were enclosed. "They were living
in a charnel house strewn with the
dead bodies of their comrades and
with wounded men delirious for lack of
drink." When at last they surrendered,
on the night of July 17, the survivors
(not more than one hundred and forty)
were received by their British victors
with the honors of war. By that time,



HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR



while La Boisselle "was no more than
a flat layer of pounded grey stones
and mortar on the bare face of the
earth," Ovillers-la-Boisselle was "non-
existent." With reference to these posi-
tions, a young officer said: "It's
marvellous to think those lines could
ever have been taken. I am not a bit
surprised the Hun thought them im-
pregnable. Anyone would, when you
come to look over them. Even now,
when they have been pounded out of
all recognition by our heavies, you'd
think such a network could be held
against any possible advance."

The courageous behavior of this
garrison was the more notable by con-
trast with the cases where numbers of
German soldiers, caught in cellars or
dugouts, surrendered in mass. As a
Middlesex sergeant expressed it, "They
fight real well till you're right on top of
them, I'll say that. Only, man for
man, when it comes to it, they can't
live alongside our chaps, ye know, sir
not they." The same sergeant adds
his testimony to the frequently stated
experience as to the scarcity of German
officers in the captured lines, when he
says, they "do keep most uncommon
well out of the way." He himself had
seen only one, a "boy" who fought
bravely in a dugout near Oviljers.

NEW GERMAN GUNS ARE TURNED ON
THE BRITISH.

Several days of rain and mist, when
poor visibility impeded observation
from the air, gave the enemy an oppor-
tunity to bring up guns and increase
bombardments from new batteries
upon territory every foot of which was
familiar. They concentrated attack
with shells, gas andflammenwerfer upon
the region around Longueval and
Delville Wood.

It was considered unnecessary to
make a direct assault upon Combles if
the ridges on each side could be taken.
Accordingly, the right wing of the
British had been assigned the village of
Morval as their objective, while the
French were to advance toward Sailly-
Sailisel. This involved the capture of
several well-fortified villages, woods,
and trench systems. In Sir Douglas
Haig's summary he states: "As the



high ground on each side 'of the
Combles valley commands the slopes
of the ridge on the opposite side, it
was essential that the advance of the
two armies should be simultaneous and
made in the closest co-operation."

The next step to be taken eastward
by the British was an approach to
Guillemont from Trones Wood, a
movement so difficult, because of the
bare stretch of country between, that
their first effort failed. Meanwhile,
the French made a good advance east
of Hardecourt, widening their break in
the enemy front. Beyond them lay
their most difficult problem, in the
defile between the Combles valley and
the fortified wood of St. Pierre Vaast.

THE ADVANCE OF THE FIFTH ARMY ON
THE LEFT.

Sir Hubert Cough's advance in the
direction of Pozieres had been steady
and unremitting, though slow. On the
left, where his Fifth Army was operat-
ing, certain adjustments had been
made, before July 23, when the great
attack upon Pozieres was launched.
In the section between the Ancre and
the Albert-Bapaume road and extend-
ing a little south of the road, the
Second Corps and the First Anzac
Corps had been placed, just to the left
of the Third Corps. The attack upon
Pozieres was assigned to the Austra-
lians, who were to come up from the
southeast, with a certain Midland
Territorial division co-operating by
attacking from the southwest. Lying
between them and the ridge beyond
the village, where the ruins of the
Windmill crowned the highest eleva-
tion of the water-shed, three almost
parallel lines of enemy works presented
formidable barriers to be surmounted.
The first was a sunken road which had
been transformed into a strong line of
defense. The second was a difficult
line of trenches. The third was the
highway itself where it entered and
passed through the heart of the village.
After three days of unfailing heroism,
cool .indifference to danger, steady
response to discipline, in the face of
incessant barrage from the invisible
German guns as well as the frenzied
fighting of the more immediate adver-

529



HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR



saries, the Australians and the Mid-
land troops were able to join forces in
the cemetery north of the village.
"The whole resources of military art
had been exhausted to render this posi-
tion impregnable. But, battered to
pieces so far as the above-ground con-
structions were concerned, the nerve-
shattered garrison had been unable to
resist the determined assaults of the
British and Australians."

q^HE AUSTRALIANS ALSO WIN HIGH PRAISE.

As at Gallipoli, Lieutenant-General
Birdwood's Anzacs had displayed an
undaunted and invincible spirit, going
along through the barrage "as you
would go through a summer shower."
One of their best officers announced,
"I have to walk about as if I liked it;
what else can you do when your own
men teach you to?" The distinguished
British regulars on their flank sent
them a message to say they were
proud to fight side by side with such
valiant men.

"The sight of that ridge from the
road east of Ovillers was one that no
man who saw it was likely to forget.
It seemed to be smothered monoto-
nously in smoke and fire. Wafts of the
thick heliotrope smell of the lachry-
matory shells floated down from it.
Out of the dust and glare would come
Australian units which had been re-
lieved, long, lean men with the shadows
of a great fatigue around their deep-
set, far-sighted eyes. They were per-
fectly cheerful and composed, and no
Lowland Scot was ever less inclined
to expansive speech. At the most they
would admit in their slow, quiet voices
that what they had been through had
been 'some battle.' '

QTRONG POSITIONS YET TO BE TAKEN.

.While making the "slow and meth-
odical progression" appointed for it,
the Fifth Army was carrying out the
further instruction to act as a pivot for
the troops on its right. Thiepval, still
before them, was a point in the old
German first line, with all approaches
deeply fortified. In good time it was
to be stormed. On the right flank of
the Fourth Army the position at Del-

530



ville Wood and Longueval formed a
dangerous salient for the elimination
of which the combined advance of the
adjoining British and French lines on
the south was necessary. The guns of
Guillemont were the great menace.
Several unsuccessful isolated attacks
by the British upon the village led to
the planning of a "series of combined
attacks to be delivered in progressive
stages" upon the surrounding enemy
strongholds. In the interval before
the next great phase of the battle
opened, on September 12, the prose-
cution of these plans was pushed for-
ward. On the right, the French and
British were swinging around to come
into line with the centre; on the left
the pivoting point was holding firmly
and preparing the way for an advance to
a new position. Between, the centre
forces were climbing up towards the
summit of the ridge and waging stern,
incessant warfare for the mastery of
High Wood and Delville Wood. Be-
tween Pozieres and Thiepval the ruin-
ous remains of what had been the
Windmill and Mouquet (familiarly
called "Moocow") Farm did not cease
to be scenes of hot turmoil until they
were secured beyond question. Al-
though most of the fighting was in the
way of local attacks, sapping and
bombing, three general attacks were