III
Ten miles to the east of Amiens a steep-sided ridge divides the converging rivers of Ancre and Somme. They meet where it sinks, at its western end, into the plain. From the ridge there was, in prewar days, a beautiful view. On the south the ground fell from your feet abruptly, a kind of earth cliff, to the north bank of the Somme, about a hundred feet below. Southwards, beyond the river, stretched, as far as eye could see, the expanse of the level Santerre, one of France’s best cornlands. Southeastward you looked up the Somme valley, mile after mile, towards Bray and Péronne—a shining valley of poplars and stream and linked ponds and red-roofed villages among the poplars. But now the Santerre lay untilled, gone back to heath of a faded fawn-grey. The red roofs had been shelled; the Germans possessed them; the Germans held the blasted heath, across the river; other Germans held most of the ridge on this side to a mile or so east of the point to which I was posted that morning. English troops were to carry the eastern end of the ridge and the tricky low ground between it and the Somme. Australian and Canadian troops were to attack on a broad front, out on the level Santerre, across the river and under our eyes.
But there was no seeing. The mist, in billowy, bolster-like masses, wallowed and rolled about at the touch of light airs; at one moment a figure some thirty yards off could be seen and then a thickened whiteness would rub it out; down the earth cliff we looked into a cauldron of that seething milky opaqueness. Of what might go on in that pit of enigma the eye could tell nothing; the mind hung on what news might come through the ear. We knew that there was to be no prior bombardment; the men would start with the barrage and go for five miles across the Santerre if they could, pushing the enemy off it. The stage was set, the play of plays was about to begin on the broad stage below; only, between our eyes and the boards there was hung a white curtain.
Up the cliff, fumbling and muted, came the first burst of the barrage, suggesting, as barrages usually do, a race between sounds, a piece bangingly played against time on a keyboard. Now the men would be rising full length above earth and walking out with smoking breath and bejewelled eyebrows into the infested mist. Then our guns, for an interval, fell almost silent—first lift of the barrage—a chance for hungry ears to assess the weight of the enemy’s answering gunfire. Surely, surely it had not all the volume it had had at Arras and Ypres last year. And then down came our barrage again, like one rifle-bolt banging home, and all thought was again with the friends before whose faces the wall of splashing metal, earth, and flame had just risen and moved on ahead like the pillars of fire and cloud.
Hours passed, bringing the usual changes of sounds in battles. The piece that had started so rapidly on the piano slowed down; the notes spaced themselves out; the first continuous barking of many guns slackened off irregularly into isolated barks and groups of barks—just what you hear from a dog whose temper is subsiding, with occasional returns. That, in itself, told nothing. Troops might only have gained a few hundred yards in the old Flanders way, and then flopped down to dig and be murdered. Or—but one kept a tight hand on hope. One had hoped too often since Loos. And then the mist lifted. It rolled right up into the sky in one piece, like a theatre curtain, almost suddenly taking its white quilted thickness away from between our eyes and the vision so much longed for during four years. Beyond the river a miracle—the miracle—had begun. It was going on fast. Remember that all previous advances had gained us little more than freedom to skulk up communication trenches a mile or two further eastward, if that. But now! Across the level Santerre, which the sun was beginning to fill with a mist-filtered lustre, two endless columns of British guns, wagons, and troops were marching steadily east, unshelled, over the ground that the Germans had held until dawn.
Nothing like it had ever been seen in the war. Above, on our cliff, we turned and stared at each other. We must have looked rather like Cortes’ men agape on their peak. The marvel seemed real; the road lay open and dry across the Red Sea. Far off, six thousand yards off in the shining southeast, tanks and cavalry were at work, shifting and gleaming and looking huge on the skyline of some little rumpled fold of the Santerre plateau. Nearer, the glass could make out an enemy battery, captured complete, caught with the leather caps still on the muzzles of guns. The British dead on the plain, horses and men, lay scattered thinly over wide spaces; scarcely a foundered tank could be seen; the ground had turf on it still; it was only speckled with shell-holes, not disembowelled or flayed. The war had put on a sort of benignity, coming out gallantly on the top of the earth and moving about in the air and the sun; the warm heath, with so few dead upon it, looked almost clement and kind, almost gay after the scabrous mud wastes and the stink of the captured dugouts of the Salient, piled up to ground-level with corpses, some feet uppermost, some heads, like fish in a basket, making you think what wonderful numbers there are of mankind. For a moment, the object of all dream and desire seemed to have come; the flaming sword was gone, and the gate of the
