l dust-storm. Then
Germans were reported coming on again, as in the morning. Again our
artillery descended upon them like a hailstorm, and nothing came of the
attack.

During all this time, in spite of the shelling, the troops were slowly
working forwards through Pozieres; not backwards. Every day saw fresh
ground gained. A great part of the men who were working through it had
no more than two or three hours' sleep since Saturday--some of them none
at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.

The only relief to this one-sided struggle against machinery was the
hand-to-hand fighting that occurred in the two trenches
before-mentioned--the second-line German trench behind Pozieres and the
similar trench in front of it. The story of it will be told some day--it
would almost deserve a book to itself.

CHAPTER XVI

AN ABYSM OF DESOLATION

_France, August 1st._

When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation
could reach. A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under
which men had burrowed like rats, but with method, so as to make a city
underneath the shattered foundations of the village. And then their rat
city had been crushed in from above; and through the splintered timbered
entrances you peered into a dark interior of dishevelled blankets and
scattered clothing. It was only too evident that there had been no time
as yet, in the hustle of battle, to search these ghastly, noisome
dug-outs for the Germans who had been bombed there. The mine craters in
the white chalk of La Boiselle are big enough to hide a large church.

But for sheer desolation it will not compare with Pozieres. On the top
of a gently rising hill, over which the Roman road ran as is the way
with Roman roads, was a pretty village, with its church, its cemetery
under the shady trees; its orchards and picturesque village houses. When
the lines crystallised in front of Albert it was some miles behind the
German trenches. Our guns put a few shells into it; but six weeks ago it
was still a country village, somewhat wrecked but probably used for the
headquarters of a German regiment. Then came the British bombardment for
a week before the battle of the Somme.

The bombardment shattered Pozieres. Its buildings were scattered as you
would scatter a house of toy bricks. Its trees began to look ragged. By
the time Boiselle and Ovilliers were taken, and the front had pushed up
to within a quarter or half a mile of Po