room to plant two guns to one around the bulging
British line. For many days they had been quietly registering as they
massed their artillery for their last serious effort during the season
of 1916 in the north.

Anything done to the Canadians always came close home to me; and news of
this attack and of its ferocity to anyone knowing the positions was
bound to carry apprehension, lasting only until we learned that the
Canadians were already counter-attacking, which set your pulse tingling
and little joy-bells ringing in your head. It meant, too, that the
Germans could not have developed any offensive that would be serious to
the situation as a whole at that moment, in the midst of preparations
for the Somme. Nothing could be seen of the fight, even had one known
that it was coming, in that flat region where everyone has to follow a
communication trench with only the sky directly overhead visible.

There was an epic quality in the story of what happened as you heard it
from the survivors. It was an average quiet morning in the first-line
trenches when the German hurricane broke from all sides; but first-line
trenches is not the right phrase, for all the protection that could be
made was layers of sandbags laboriously filled and piled to a thickness
sufficient to stop a bullet at short range.

What luxury in security were the dugouts of the Somme hills compared to
the protection that could be provided here! When the first series of
bursts announced the storm you could not descend a flight of steps to a
cavern whose roof was impenetrable even by five-hundred-pound shells.
Little houses of sandbags with corrugated tin roofs, in some instances
level with the earth, which any direct hit could "do in" were the best
that generous army resources could permit. High explosive shells must
turn such breastworks into rags and heaps of earth. There was nothing to
shoot at if a man tried to stick to the parapet, for fresh troops fully
equipped for their task back in the German trenches waited on demolition
of the Canadian breastworks before advancing under their own barrage.
Shrapnel sent down its showers, while the trench walls were opened in
great gaps and tossed heavenward. Officers clambered about in the midst
of the spouts of dust and smoke over the piles and around the craters,
trying to keep in touch with their men, when it was a case of every man
taking what cover he could.

"The limit!" as the men said. "The absolute limit