The long Lee Enfield rifles held out before them, the fixed bayonets aglitter, sinking ankle and knee deep into the soft earth, slipping into the overlapping shell holes and dragging themselves out again, their line bulging and lagging, their horizon limited to a mere hundred paces by swirling nitrous fog, they trudged forward.
Of the enemy trenches they saw no sign, the parapets had been obliterated and flattened. Overhead passed the continuous roar of the barrage, while every few seconds a short shell from their own guns fell into their densely packedlines.
Close up in the centre! The gaps torn in their ranks by the guns were filled by other amorphous khaki bodies.
Keep the line! Keep the line! The orders were almost drowned by the tumult of the guns.
Then in the wilderness ahead of them they saw the glint of metal through the smoke. It was a low wall of metal, interlocking scales of grey steel like those on the back of a crocodile.
The German machine-gunners had had the benefit of seven days forewarning, and as the British barrage rolled away behind them, they carried their weapons up the shafts from their dugouts to the surface and set them up on their tripods on the churned muddy lip of the ruined trenches. The Maxim machine-guns were each fitted with a steel shield to protect the crews from rifle-fire, and the guns were so closely aligned that the edges of the shields overlapped each other.
The British infantry was out in the open, walking down on a wall of machine-guns. The front ranks yelled when they saw the guns and started forward at a run, trying to reach them with the bayonet. Then they ran into the wire.
They had been assured that the barbed wire would be cut to pieces by the barrages. It was not. The high- explosive had made no impression upon it, except to tangle and twist it into an even more formidable barrier. While they floundered and struggled in the grip of the wire, the German Maxim machine-guns opened up on them.
The Maxim machine-gun has a cyclic rate of fire of 500 rounds per minute. It has the reputation of being the most reliable and rugged machine-gun ever built, and that day it added to that reputation the distinction of becoming the most lethal weapon that man had ever devised. As the plodding ranks of British infantry emerged from the fog of nitro-smoke, still attempting to maintain their rigid formation, shoulder to shoulder and four ranks deep, they made a perfect target for the Maxims. The solid sheets of fire swung back and forth, the scythe-blades of the harvesters, and the carnage surpassed anything seen before upon the battlefields of history.
The losses would certainly have been greater had not the troops, under the extreme duress of the Maxims, used their common sense and broken ranks. Instead of that ponderous, wooden-beaded advance, they had tried to creep and crawl forward in small groups, but even these had finally been beaten back by the wall of machine- guns.
Then with another grand offensive on the Western Front decimated almost as it began, the German force holding the ridges opposite Mort Homme counterattacked jubilantly.
Centaine became gradually aware of the cessation of that distant holocaust, and the strange stillness which followed it.
What has happened, Papa? The British troops have overrun the German artillery positions, the comte explained excitedly. I have a mind to ride across and view the battlefield. I want to bear witness to this turning-point in history - You will do no such idiotic thin& Anna told him brusquely.
You don't understand, woman, even as we stand here talking, our Allies are rolling forward, eating up the German lines What I understand is that the milch cow has to be fed, and the cellars have to be mucked ouC While history passes me by, the comte capitulated ungraciously, and went muttering down to the cellar.
Then the guns began again, much closer, and the windows rattled in their frames. The comte shot up the stairs and into the yard.
What is happening now, Papa? it is the death-throes of the German army, the comte explained, the last thrashings of a dying giant. But do not worry, my little one, the British will soon invest their positions. We have nothing to fear. The thunder of the guns rose to a crescendo and was heightened by the din of the British counter- barrages as they sought to destroy the German counter -attack that was massing in the front-line trenches facing the ridges.
It sounds just like last summer. Centaine stared with foreboding at the stark outline of the chalk ridges upon the horizon. They were blurring slightly before her eyes, shrouding in the haze of shell-bursts. We must do what we can for them, she told Anna.
We have to think of ourselves, Anna protested. We still have to go on living and we cannot-'Come, Anna, we are wasting time. Under Centaine's insistence they cooked up four of the huge copper kettles of soup, turnip and dried peas and potato, flavoured with ham bones. They used up their reserves of flour at a prodigious rate to bake ovenful after ovenful. of bread loaves, and then they loaded the small hand-cart and trundled it down the lane to the main road.
Centaine remembered clearly the fighting of the previous summer, but what she witnessed now shocked her afresh.
The highway was choked, filled from hedgerow to hedgerow with the tides of war, flowing in both directions, piling up and intermingling and then separating again.
Down from the ridges came the human detritus of the battle, torn and bloody, mutilated and bleeding, crowded into the slowly moving ambulances, into horse-drawn carts and drays, or limping on improvised crutches, borne on the shoulders of their stronger fellows, or clinging to the sides of the over-crowded ambulances for support as they stumbled through the deep muddy ruts.
In the opposite direction marched the reserves and reinforcements moving up to help hold the ridges against the German assault. They were in long files, already worn down under the weight of equipment they carried, not even glancing at the torn remnants of the battle which they might soon be joining. They trudged forward, watching their feet, and stopped when the way ahead was blocked, standing with bovine patience, only moving forward again when the man ahead of them started.
After the initial shock, Centaine helped Anna push the hand-cart up on to the verge, and then while Anna ladled out the thick soup, she handed the mugs, each with a thick slice of newly baked bread, to the exhausted and injured soldiers as they stumbled past.
There was not nearly enough, she could feed only one man in a hundred. Those whom she picked out as being in greatest need gulped down the soup and wolfed the bread.
