eastern front was also in
progress. This long-awaited movement was no isolated attack, costly but
ineffectual, like those of the English at Neuve Chapelle and Loos,
but "a carefully studied and deliberately prepared campaign of severe
pressure upon Germany at each of her battle fronts." It proved that the
war-councils of the Allies held in Paris and London, in Petrograd and
Rome, were no mere conventional affairs, but were at last to bear fruit
in concerted action that might decide the issue of the war.

The "big push," as it was popularly called in England, was started by
the British and French on both sides of the River Somme, sixty miles
north of Paris, at 7:30 o 'clock on the morning of July 1, and resulted
on the same day in a great wedge being driven into the German lines
along a front of twenty-five miles, with its sharp point penetrating
nearly five miles. The French advance was made in the direction of
Peronne, an important center of transportation and distribution long
held by the Germans.

An eyewitness who watched the beginning of the battle from a hill said
that overwhelming as was the power of the guns, yet as the gathering
of human and mechanical material proceeded, "the grim and significant
spectacle was the sight of detachments of infantry moving forward in
field-fighting equipment, until finally the dugouts were hives of khaki
ready to swarm out for battle."

As the days of the bombardment passed, the air of expectancy was
noticeable everywhere through the British army, commanded by Sir Douglas
Haig. Finally the word was passed that the infantry was to make the
assault early the next morning. Then, "at 7:20 A.M. the rapid-fire
trench mortars added their shells to the deluge pouring upon the
first-line German trenches. After ten minutes of this, promptly at
7:30 o'clock, the guns lifted their fire to the second line of German
trenches, as if they were answering to the pressure of a single electric
button, and the men of the new British army leaped over their parapets
and rushed toward the wreckage the guns and mortars had wrought. Even
close at hand, they were visible for only a moment before being hidden
by the smoke of the German shell-curtain over what remained of the
trenches."

Of the deadly work beneath that pall of smoke, as steel met steel and
the new soldiers of Britain fleshed their bayonets for the first time,
and fell by the thousand under the murderous fire of machine-guns,
history wil