the sight of the battlefield
for miles around--that reeking village. Now he would send them crashing
in on a line south of the road--eight heavy shells at a time, minute
after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel. Now he would
place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and
landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through
a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear
shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with
black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy
pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black
clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men
worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon
as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand--building up whatever it
battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and
again.

What is a barrage against such troops! They went through it as you would
go through a summer shower--too proud to bend their heads, many of them,
because their mates were looking. I am telling you of things I have
seen. As one of the best of their officers said to me, "I have to walk
about as if I liked it--what else can you do when your own men teach
you to?" The same thought struck me not once but twenty times.

On Tuesday morning the shelling of the day before rose to a crescendo,
and then suddenly slackened. The German was attacking. It was only a few
of the infantry who even saw him. The attack came in lines at fairly
wide intervals up the reverse slope of the hill behind Pozieres
windmill. Before it reached the crest it came under the sudden barrage
of our own guns' shrapnel. The German lines swerved away up the hill.
The excited infantry on the extreme right could see Germans crawling
over, as quickly as they might, from one shell crater to another, grey
backs hopping from hole to hole. They blazed away hard; but most of our
infantry never got the chance it was thirsting for. The artillery beat
back that attack before it was over the crest, and the Germans broke and
ran. Again the enemy's artillery was turned on. Pozieres was pounded
more furiously than before, until by four in the afternoon it seemed to
onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such an
ordeal. The place could be picked out for miles by pillars of red and
black dust towering above it like a Broken Hil