ed, as the first step, the building of many miles of railway and
highway for the transport of the enormous requisite quantities of guns
and materials.

The Somme winds through rich alluvial lands at this point and around a
number of verdant islands in its leisurely course. Southward, along the
old front line, the land is more level, where the river makes its bend
in front of Peronne. Northward, generically, it rises into a region of
rolling country, with an irregularly marked ridge line which the Germans
held.

No part of the British front had been so quiet in the summer of 1915 as
the region of Picardy. From the hill where later I watched the attack of
July 1st, on one day in August of the previous year I had such a broad
view that if a shell were to explode anywhere along the front of five
miles it would have been visible to me, and I saw not a single burst of
smoke from high explosive or shrapnel. Apparently the Germans never
expected to undertake any offensive here. All their energy was devoted
to defensive preparations, without even an occasional attack over a few
hundred yards to keep in their hand. Tranquillity, which amounted to the
simulation of a truce, was the result. At different points you might see
Germans walking about in the open and the observer could stand exposed
within easy range of the guns without being sniped at by artillery, as
he would have been in the Ypres salient.

When the British took over this section of line, so short were they of
guns that they had to depend partly on French artillery; and their
troops were raw New Army battalions or regulars stiffened by a small
percentage of veterans of Mons and Ypres. The want of guns and shells
required correspondingly more troops to the mile, which left them still
relying on flesh and blood rather than on machinery for defense. The
British Army was in that middle stage of a few highly trained troops and
the first arrival of the immense forces to come; while the Germans
occupied on the Eastern front were not of a mind to force the issue.
There is a story of how one day a German battery, to vary the monotony,
began shelling a British trench somewhat heavily. The British, in reply,
put up a sign, "If you don't stop we will fire our only rifle grenade at
you!" to which the Germans replied in the same vein, "Sorry! We will
stop"--as they did.

The subsoil of the hills is chalk, which yields to the pick rather
easily and makes firm walls for trenches.