open.

After dark, the Australians pushed across the road through the village.
By morning the position had been improved, so that nearly the whole
village was secure against sudden attack.

An official report would read: "The same progress continued on Tuesday
night, and by Wednesday morning the whole of Pozières was consolidated."
That is to say--in the heart of the village itself there was little more
actual hand-to-hand fighting. All that happened there was that, from the
time when the first day broke and found the Pozières position
practically ours, the enemy turned his guns on to it. Hour after
hour--day and night--with increasing intensity as the days went on, he
rained heavy shell into the area. It was the sight of the battlefield
for miles around--that reeking village. Now he would send them crashing
in on a line south of the road--eight heavy shells at a time, minute
after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel. Now he would
place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and
landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through
a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear
shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with
black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy
pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black
clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men
worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon
as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand--building up whatever it
battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and
again.

What is a barrage against such troops! They went through it as you would