earth churned up in shell craters, and the absolute absence of any kind
of movement (simply because it was too dangerous to move), call to one's
mind Shakespeare's old stage direction of a "blasted heath." There had
been a short artillery preparation; the attack reminded one of our old
raids up on the Armentières front.

I have seen Germans who were in the line in front of that attack. They
state that they were not surprised. In the light of their flares they
had seen numbers of "Englishmen" advancing over the shoulder of the
hill. When the rush came, one German officer told me, he, in his short
sector of the line alone, had three machine-guns all hard at work. The
attack reached the remnants of the German wire. Some brave men picked a
path through the tangle, and, in spite of the cross-fire, managed to
reach the German trench. They were very few. We have since discovered
men in the craters even beyond the front German trench. The German
officer told me that his men had afterwards found an Australian who had
been lying in a crater in front of his line for four days. He had been
shot through the abdomen and had a broken leg, but he had been brought
in by the Germans and was doing well. We also afterwards brought in both
Australians and Germans who had been out there for six days, wounded,
living on what rations they had with them.

It was a brave attack. On the extreme left it succeeded. But the
trenches won by the Victorians there were on the flank, not on the
hill-top. The country behind that crest, sloping gradually down to the
valley of Courcelette and beyond, where the German field batteries were
firing and where the Germans could come and go unseen--all this was so
far an unknown land into which no one on the British side had peered
since the battle began.