droops from the broken masts of a wreck.

We were looking another way, watching our troops trying to creep up to
the extreme right-hand end of the red trench on the top of the hill. We
could see them on the centre of the crest; but here, where the trench
ran into the upper end of Fricourt Wood, there was apparently a check.
Men were lined up at this point, not in the trench, but lying down on
the surface a little on our side of it. From beyond that corner of the
wood there broke out occasionally a chatter of machine-gun fire.
Evidently the Germans still hung on there. The bursts of machine-gun
must have been against small rushes of our men across the open. I
believe that one British unit was attacking round this left-hand corner
of the wood while another was attacking around its right. The drive
through the wood was going forward at the same time. Clearly they were
having some effect; for out of the wood there suddenly appeared a number
of figures. Someone thought they were our men coming back, until it was
noticed that they were unarmed, and held their hands up. They were a
party of the enemy who had surrendered, and for the next quarter of an
hour we watched them being marched slowly down the hill-side opposite.

Our advance here seemed to be held up by some cause we could not see.
German 5.9 shell were falling just on our side of Fricourt village, and
in a line from there up the valley behind our attack. It was not a
really heavy barrage--big black shell-bursts at intervals on the ground,
helped by fairly constant white puffs of shrapnel in the air above them.
Just then our attention was attracted in quite another direction: La
Boiselle.

It had been fairly obvious for some time that La Boiselle was about to
be attacked. While the rest of the landscape before us was only treated