bserver who sees
the one who is "it" in blind man's buff missing his quarry. Some
shrapnel searching a road in front and a scream overhead indicated a
parcel of high explosives for a village at the rear. In Morval where
houses were still standing, their white walls visible through the
glasses, there was a kind of flash which was not that of a shell but
prolonged, like a windowpane flaming under the sun, which we knew meant
that the village was taken, as was also Gueudecourt we learned
afterward.

Reserves were filing along a road between the tiers of guns, helmets on
the backs of heads French fashion when there is no fire, with the easy
marching stride of the French and figures disappeared and reappeared on
the slope as they advanced. Wounded were coming along the winding gray
streak of highway near where we sat and a convoy of prisoners passed led
by a French guard whose attitude seemed to have an eye-twinkling of "See
who's here and see what I've got!" Not far away was a French private at
a telephone.

"It goes well!" he said. "Rancourt is taken and we are advancing on
Fregicourt. Combles is a ripe plum."

All the while Combles had been an oasis in the shell fire, the one place
that had immunity, although it had almost as much significance in the
imagination of the French people as Thiepval in that of the English.
They looked forward to its storming as a set dramatic event and to its
fall as one of the turning-points in the campaign. Often a position
which was tactically of little importance, to our conception, would
become the center of great expectations to the outside world, while the
conquest of a strong point with its nests of machine guns produced no
responsive thrill.

Combles was a village and a large village, its size perhaps accounting
for the importance associated with it when it had almost none in a
military sense. Yet correspondents knew that readers at the breakfast
table would be hungry for details about Combles, where the taking of the
Schwaben Redoubt or Regina Trench, which were defended savagely, had no
meaning. Its houses were very distinct, some being but little damaged
and some of the shade trees still retaining their branches. This town
nestling in a bowl was not worth the expenditure of much ammunition when
what the Germans wanted to hold and the Anglo-French troops to gain was
the hills around it. Rancourt was the other side of Combles, which
explains the plum simile.

The picturesque t