sation.

It is the drumming of the German artillery upon our charging infantry.
Behind that blue screen they must be in the thick of it. God be with our
men!

CHAPTER XII

THE BRITISH--FRICOURT AND LA BOISELLE

_France, July 3rd._

Yesterday three of us walked out from near the town of Albert to a
hill-side within a few hundred yards of Fricourt. And there all day,
lying amongst the poppies and cornflowers, we watched the fight of the
hour--the struggle around Fricourt Wood and the attack on the village of
La Boiselle.

To call these places villages conveys the idea of recognisable streets
and houses. I suppose they were villages once, as pretty as the other
villages of France; each with its red roofs showing out against its
dark, overshadowing woodland. They are no more villages now than a
dust-heap. Each is a tumbled heap of broken bricks, like the remains of
a Chinese den after it has been pulled down by order of the local
council. Through this heap runs a network of German trenches, here and
there breaking through some still recognisable fragment of a wall.

It was by the sight of two or three English soldiers clambering up one
of these jagged fragments and peering into whatever lay beyond it, that
we knew, as we came in sight of Fricourt, that the village had already
been taken. A string of men was winding past the end of the dust-heap
into the dark wood behind it, where they became lost to view. Somewhere
in the heart of the wood was the _knock-knock_ of an occasional rifle.
So the fight had gone on thither.

In front of us was a long gentle hill-slope, gridironed with trenches
which broke out above the green grass like the wandering burrow of a
mole. The last visible trench was in redder soil and ran along the crest
of the hill. It passed through or near to several small woods and clumps
of trees--the edges of them torn to shreds with shell-fire. They stood
up against the skyline. In one of them, clearly visible, was a roadside
crucifix.

Our men possessed the whole of that slope right into the trench at the
top. We could see occasional figures strolling about the old German
trenches--probably from posts established here or there behind the line
of battle. All day long odd men wandered up or down some part of the
hill-side--a guard with a German prisoner coming down, a messenger or
stretcher-bearers going up. Now and then one could even see heads, with
our flat steel helmets on them, showing o