uman in this. None had any sense
of the glorious sport of war, only that of grim routine.

Our group was not particularly religious, but I think that we were all
uttering a prayer for England and France. At seven-thirty something
seemed to crack in our brains. There was no visible sign that a wave of
men twenty-five miles long, reaching from Gommecourt to Soyecourt,
wherever the trenches ran across fields, through villages and along
slopes to the banks of the Somme and beyond, had left their parapets. I
knew the men who were going into that charge too well to have any
apprehension that any battalion would falter. The thing was to be done
and they were to do it. Now they were out in No Man's Land; now they
were facing the reception prepared for them. Thousands might already be
down. We could discern that the German guns, long waiting for their
prey, were seeking it in eager ferocity as they laid their curtains of
fire on the appointed places which they had registered. The hell of the
poets and the priests must have some emotion, some temperamental
variation. This was sheer mechanical hell, its pulse that of the dynamo
and the engine.

Seven-forty-five! Helplessly we stared at the blanket. If the charge had
gone home it was already in the German trenches. For all we knew it
might have been repulsed and its remnants be struggling back through the
curtains of artillery fire and the sweep of machine gun fire. As the sun
came out without clearing away the mist and shell-smoke over the field
we had glimpses of some reserves who had looked like a yellow patch
behind a hill deploying to go forward, suggestive of yellow-backed
beetles who were the organized servitors of a higher mind on some other
planet.

This was all we saw; and to make more of it would not be fair to other
occasions when views of attacks were more intimate. Yet I would not
change the impression now. It has its place in the spectator's history
of the battle.

VI

FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME

At the little schoolhouse--Twenty miles of German fortifications
taken--Doubtful situation north of Thiepval--Prisoners and
wounded--Defeat and victory--The topography of Thiepval--Sprays of
bullets and blasts of artillery fire--"The day" of the New Army--The
courage of civilized man--Fighting with a kind of divine
stubbornness--Braver than the "Light Brigade"--Died fighting as final
proof of the New Army's spirit--Crawling back through No