two, three, four, with sharp knocks that clouted one's ears. I sat on a wooden box on the top of an old dugout in the midst of all the fury. There was a great gun to my left, and every time it fired it shook the box and all the earth underneath with violent vibration.

The moon disappeared soon after 3 o'clock, and no stars were to be seen, but presently a faint ghost of dawn appeared. The white earth of the old and disused trenches about me became visible. A lark arose and sang overhead, and at 3:30 o'clock there was a sudden moment of hush. It was the lifting of the guns and the time of attack. Over there in the darkness by Mametz Wood and Montauban thousands of men had risen to their feet, and were going forward to the second German line or to the place where death was waiting for them.

At 4:10 there was a red glow to the right of Montauban. It rose and spread upward, a great torch with sparks dancing over it.

"By jove," cried one of the men near me, "that's Longueval on fire."

In a little while there was no doubt about it. I could see the sharp edge of the broken buildings in the heart of the red glow. The village of Longueval was in flames.

Later in the day the backwash of the battle, the wounded and the prisoners, came down like the tide, but long before then I knew we had broken the second line and our men were fighting on the high ground beyond. The village of Longueval was ours; Bazentin-le-Grand, both wood and village, and Bazentin-lePetit were ours. The gallant body of men had swept through Trones Wood, on the extreme right of the line, and patrols were pushing into Delville Wood and toward the highest ridge behind the broken German trenches.

I hear these trenches in the second German line are not deeply dug and that the dugouts themselves hardly bombproof.

For once in a way the Germans have been overconfident, and paid now a bitter price for their pride in believing the first line was impregnable. I do not care to write about this part of the fighting. It

was bloody work, and would not be good to read. An incident was told me by a kilted Sergeant as he lay wounded. From one of the dugouts came a German officer. He had a wild light in his eyes, and carried a great axe.

"I surrender," he said in good English, and in broad Scotch the Sergeant told him if he had an idea of surrender

ing it would be a good and wise thing to drop his chopper first; but the German officer swung it high, and it came like a flash past the Sergeant's head. Like a flash also the bayonet did its work.

While the men were cleaning up the dugouts in the first-line trenches other men pressed on and stormed into Longueval village. The great fires there which I had seen in the darkness died down, and there was only a glow and smolder of them in the ruins; but the machine guns were still chattering.

In one broken building there were six of them firing through holes in the walls. It was a strong redoubt, sweeping the ground which had once been a roadway and now was a shambles. Scottish soldiers rushed the place and flung bombs into it until there was no more swish of bullets, but only a rising of smoke clouds and black dust.

Longueval was a heap of charred bricks above the ground, but there was still trouble below ground before it was firmly taken. There are many cellars in which the Germans fought like wolves at bay, and down in the darkness of these places men fought savagely, seeing only the glint of each others' eyes and feeling for each others' throats, unless there were still bombs handy to make a quicker ending.

It was primitive warfare; cavemen fought like that in such darkness, though not with bombs, which belong to our age. TUESDAY, JULY 18

In all the fighting during the last fortnight the struggle for Ovillers stands out separately as a siege in which both attack and defense were of the most dogged and desperate kind. The surrender of the remnants of its garrison last night ends an episode which will not be forgotten in history.

These men were of the Third Prussian

Guards, and our Commander in Chief in his day's dispatches has paid tribute to their bravery, which is echoed by the officers and men who fought against them. It is a tribute to our own troops also, who, by no less courage, broke down the stubborn resistance and captured the garrison.

* *

I have already described the earlier phases of the siege. But after that, when our men were separated from the enemy by only a yard or two or by only a barricade or two, the artillery on both sides ceased to fire upon Ovillers lest the gunners should kill their own men. They barraged intensely round about. Our shells fell incessantly to the north and east. So that the beleaguered garrison should not get supplies or reinforcements we made a wall of death about them. But, though no shells now burst over the ground where many dead lay strewn, there was artillery of a lighter kind, not less deadly. It was the artillery of machine guns and bombs. The Prussian Guards made full use of the vaulted cellars and ruined houses. They made a series of small keeps which were defended almost entirely by machine-gun fire.

Between the attacks of our bombing parties they went below ground into dark vaults, where it was safe enough from trench mortar and hand grenades, leaving a sentry or two on the lookout for any infantry assault. As soon as we advanced, the machine guns set to

work and played their hose of bullets across the ground which our men had to cover.

One by one, by getting around about them, by working zigzag ways through cellars and ruins, by sudden rushes of bombing parties led by young officers of daring spirit, we knocked out those machine-gun emplacements, and of the gunners who served them until yesterday there was only a last remnant of the garrison left in Ovillers.

These men of the Third Prussian Guard long had been in a hopeless position. They were starving because all supplies were cut off by our never-ending barrage. They had no water supply, so suffered all the torture of great thirst. They were living in a charnal house strewn with the dead bodies of their comrades and with wounded men delirious for lack of drink.

Human nature could make no longer resistance, and at last the officers raised the signal of surrender and came over with nearly 140 men, who held their hands up.

The fighting had been savage. At close grips, in broken earthworks and deep cellars, there had been no sentiment, but British soldiers and Germans had flung themselves upon each other with bombs and any kinds of weapon, but now, when all was ended, the last of the German garrison was received with the honors of war.

I'

change it much more as the weeks go

on.

Britain at last is fully prepared to fight. The great armies recruited and trained by Lord Kitchener, with the mountains of munitions piled up by Lloyd George, have become a tremendous weapon in the skilled hands of General Sir Douglas Haig; and they are supported on the right by a French army under General Foch that has shown itself

more than able to keep pace with them. The fighting of the British wing is eloquently described in the foregoing article by Philip Gibbs, but it must not be forgotten that the battle of the Somme is a joint enterprise of close teamwork under the supreme direction of General Joffre.

Thus far we have heard less of the French than of the English wing, but its achievement has been equally brilliant. The Germans caught between these Frenchmen and Peronne, like those caught between the British and Bapaume, have resisted to the limit of human endurance, but nothing human could survive the awful blasting of high explosives to which their first and second trench lines were subjected; and the Allies now have the shells and the men to keep up the pressure indefinitely. The stronger battalions are henceforth on their side.

A correspondent who visited the French army on July 9 in its advanced position near Peronne gives us this glimpse of the country over which the battle had swept:

"As far as the eye can see the view is utterly the same; utterly monotonous, nothing but desolate slopes that once were a thickly populated French countryside. The complete inhumanity of outlook strikes one tremendously. Here two great armies are at death grips, yet apart from the incessant tumult of cannonade and the never-ending rows of little smoke clouds-new ones forming before the preceding ones have time to melt-one might be thousands of miles from civilization. Our maps are of little assistance. Here should be Feuillers, there Flaucourt, further on Assevilliers, but one can distinguish nothing save heaps of blackened stones that appear through the glasses. Even the roads have been swept away by the bombardment. Nothing but ditchlike trench lines mark the presence of humans.

aries. Others are grouped under a kind of casemate on wheels whose roof touches the ground in front rising in a curve behind to give room for the workers. Still others hide behind a ripple of ground or hillocks.

"All are working furiously with picks and shovels. I have been told that the British losses have been heightened by an utter disregard of danger. Even when not engaged in attacks our allies seem still not to realize the necessity of unremitting caution. But the French have learned the lesson that Verdun hammered home that the best soldier is he who regards his life as belonging to France, something precious, never to be risked save when sheer necessity demands it. That, combined with the magnificent artillery service, is the reason why the French losses in this battle have been less than half-I speak from intimate knowledge those in any previous French offensive in proportion to the number of troops engaged."

A German correspondent, describing the battle of July 12, wrote to a leading Berlin newspaper:

"The violent English attacks that developed on Monday afternoon on the road from Albert to Bapaume, and whose principal blow was directed against our position from Ovillers to La Boisselle, at Contalmaison, the Wood of Mametz, Bazentin-le-Grand, and the woods of Bernafay and Thrones, have continued uninterruptedly for forty-eight hours, having increased to unheard-of violence. Approximately fourteen kilometers long, the attacking front presents a picture of one immense battle, swaying now one way, now the other.

"The English, who have a colossal numerical superiority, hurl attacking wave after wave, division after division, against our defenses, staking everything on a renewed embittered effort to wipe out the failure of the first offensive week by widening the strip of ground so far gained by them, in order to give the wedge driven into our lines a broader front.

"What our troops have performed in stemming this attacking flood and what they still are doing every moment belong

to the most glorious deeds of this war. Repeatedly in the course of these charges of unheard-of embitteredness, which continue day and night, the English have succeeded in temporarily getting a footing on the edge of positions they strove to take, but so far we have invariably succeeded in tearing their achieved success away from them by our counterattacks.

"The French are mainly pressing forward in the region of Estrées and Belloy, and also against Barleux-in other words, against our defensive dams on our south and southeast flanks. Here, too, the attacks follow one another like waves. A stubborn battle rages incessantly, in which the enemy's embittered passion for gaining ground and the loyal and glorious firmness of our defenders measure strength. Particularly Hill 97 and La Maisonette continue to be the favorite goal of the French. Their attempts to storm them continue to be checked by our barrier fire. Likewise, their mass storms in the sector from Belloy to Barleux collapsed, with frightful losses, in our fire.

"But the battle continues, and these two sectors in the enemy's offensive have perhaps not yet reached their last horrible climax of intensity."

In the first ten days the Anglo-French Armies had, to quote Sir Douglas Haig, "completed the methodical capture of the whole of the enemy's first system of defense on a front of 14,000 yards," and had taken 22,000 German prisoners and 104 guns. By the end of the first fortnight they had shattered the second line of German defenses and paused to fortify themselves in their new positions. the present writing they are undergoing heavy counterattacks, but are holding most of what they have won. They are prepared to keep up a slow and steady pressure, pounding every step of the way with heavy shells if necessary.

At

The British method of storming trenches, which has won the admiration of French officers, is to combine the smashing of concrete shelters under heavy shell fire with a system of night raiding by scouting parties. The raiders locate hidden machine guns and finish the destruction of barbed-wire entangle

ments, thus opening the way for the usual charges of infantry. If Sir Douglas Haig ever breaks through into open country he will make extensive use of cavalry.

David Lloyd George, in his new rôle of War Minister, gives this explanation of the latest turn of events:

"We have crossed the watershed, and now victory is beginning to flow in our direction. This change is due to the improvement in our equipment. The British Navy has until recently absorbed more than half the metal workers of this country. The task of building new ships and repairing the old ones for the gigantic navy, and fitting and equipping them, occupies the energies of a million men. Most of our new factories are now complete, most of the machinery has been set up. Hundreds of thousands of men and women, hitherto unaccustomed to metal and chemical work, have been trained for munitions making.

"Every month we are turning out hundreds of guns and howitzers, light, medium, and heavy; our heavy guns are rolling in at a great rate, and we are turning out nearly twice as much ammunition in a single week and, what's more, nearly three times as much heavy shell, as we fired in the great offensive in September, although the ammunition we expended in that battle was the result of many weary weeks' accumulation. The new factories and workshops we set up have not yet attained one-third their full capacity, but their output is now increasing with great rapidity. Our main difficulty in organization, construction, equipment, labor supply, and readjustment has been solved. If officials, employers, and workmen keep at it with the same zeal and assiduity as they have hitherto employed, our supplies will soon be overwhelming.

"I cannot help thinking that the improvement in the Russian ammunition has been one of the greatest and most unpleasant surprises the enemy has sustained. Still, our task is but half accomplished. Every great battle furnishes additional proof that this is a war of equipment. More ammunition means more victories and fewer casualties."