For the rest of the month there was no cessation of activities. Violent German bombardments and counterattacks accomplished no permanent advantage for the enemy. On the other hand, the weather gave opportunity again for air attacks by the Allied aviators.

In that same week, the French carried Maurepas; they and the British came together south of Guillemont; and a charge by a Rifle Brigade battalion practically finished the long sanguinary conflict in Delville Wood.

OVERWHELMED THE

HBRANDENBURGERS AT GUILLEMONT.

On September 3, Guillemont was taken in spite of the desperate defense.

one building stood was a mystery, but some queer chance had kept it tottering on its feet when everything else had not only fallen long before but had been pounded to nothing after it fell. The ruins, however, were full of enemy lurking holes, and all round the edges there were strong positions with machine-guns and (especially on the southwestern and southern sides) deep dugouts. Besides the main, formidably fortified trench line running along and before these faces of the village, the ground everywhere was dotted with smaller works and with shellholes converted into outlying strongholds."

With their pipers playing, the Irish

men swept rapidly through and beyond this position to the sunken road farther east where they could establish themselves more strongly, while the Light Infantry fighting on their right finished the task in Guillemont, dealing with troublesome machine-gun shelters and clearing the dugouts. In the roads and woods east and south of Guillemont, the fight was pressed forward for several days following.

MOUQUET FARM YIELDS AFTER TWO

At the other end of the attacking line, on the afternoon of September 3, the English, Scots, and Australians were engaged in one of the fiercest of conflicts with a Reserve Regiment of the 1st Prussian Guards, among the positions of the Mouquet Farm. "Of the farm itself, nothing remained but a waste of pounded rubbish and a few shattered fragments of trees. The enemy, however, had covered the whole area in and around the farm with trenches, isolated posts and deep dugouts, until it was practically all one fortress." There in the dimness before dawn the Germans were attacked and dislodged from their fastness after two years' occupation.

Nearer the Somme, the French First Corps, men from the northern districts whose homes were in the hands of the Germans, carried two villages and pushed on to the edges of Combles itself. Two days afterward, General Micheler's Tenth Army, south of the Somme, came into action for the first time since the battle started. They immediately seized a part of the German first position on a front of almost three miles, taking about 3,000 prisoners. And on the next day the French Armies both north and south of the river made considerable progress.

of the impetuous fervor of the assaulting troops: "Between the outer fringe. of Ginchy and the front line of our own trenches is No Man's Land, a wilderness of pits so close together that you could ride astraddle the partitions between any two of them. As you look half right, obliquely down along No Man's Land, you behold a great host of yellow-coated men.rise out of the earth and surge forward and upward in a torrent-not in extended order, as you might expect, but in one mass. There seems to be no end to them. Just when you think the flood is subsiding, another wave comes surging up the bend towards Ginchy. We joined in on the left. Our shouts and yells must have struck terror into the Huns, who were firing their machine-guns down the slope. But there was no wavering in the Irish host. We couldn't run. We advanced at a steady walking pace, stumbling here and there, but going ever onward and upward.

"How long we were in crossing No Man's Land I don't know. It could not have been more than five minutes, yet it seemed much longer. We were now well up to the Boche. We had to clamber over all manner of obstaclesfallen trees, beams, great mounds of brick and rubble-in fact, over the ruins of Ginchy. It seems like a nightmare now. I remember seeing comrades falling round me. . . . I believe our prisoners were all Bavarians, who are better mannered from all accounts than the Prussians."

AF

FEW USEFUL MILES ARE GAINED AT A
PRICE.

By steady, persistent uphill pushing, the British had gained the high position on the ridge between Thiepval and Combles. Step by step, the artillery and infantry had worked together, becoming more and more skilful in co-ordinating their movements. As a result, the lines had been pushed back a little way and the Germans on that part of the front driven into new and improvised positions. A young officer who had been wounded in the battle exclaimed, “We've gained such a few miles, they say. Pretty useful miles, though, to the top of the ridge."

SEVERAL scenes in the patches of woodland that were spread over the rolling chalk country north of the Somme, will help to a realization of what happened among those wooded slopes during the various stages of the battle that brought them out of obscurity into world-notice. The woods as they appeared while yet untouched by warfare may be pictured from this description, by Masefield, of a strip on the edge of the battle region: "It is a romantic and very lovely wood, pleasant with the noise of water and not badly damaged by the fighting. The trees are alive and leafy, the shrubs are bushing, and the spring flowers, wood anemones, violets, and the oxlip (which in this country takes the place of the primrose and the cowslip) flower beautifully."

semi-cylinders about ten feet in diameter, easily transportable, quickly set up, absolutely rain-proof, and resembling miniature models of the Zeppelin hangars. Eight men could sleep beneath each zinc dome." Already the German gunners were showing effects of the strain. Their faces "told their own story. The good nature of these skilled Teuton mechanics had given place to a grim set expression as if biting their jaws together and nerving themselves to fight off the physical fatigue of long weeks of continued cannonading. In their shirt sleeves and perspiring, with facial muscles drawn and strained, they reminded me of over-trained athletes toward the end of a hardfought long-distance race who realized that they must not 'crack' before breasting the tape. They continued. working their battery automatically, with the disciplined perfection and finished form of veterans."

foam on giant waves-in fact, it it looked for all the world like a heavy sea, only the waves were of earth."

After the flood of destruction had passed over the devoted crest of the wooded ridge, Masefield, looking northward from Mametz, described the mutilated remnants that he beheld: "Just visible as a few sticks upon the sky-line, are two other woods, High Wood, like a ghost in the distance, and the famous and terrible Wood of Delville." A French writer declares of High Wood (Bois des Foureaux) that he can think of no more melancholy walk than a visit to the spot. A dark stain upon the height, it can be seen from all around, and broad bare stretches of the plateau have to be crossed in order to reach it from any direction. "An immense silence," he says, "reigns over all these solitudes." As for the forests themselves, he calls them ruins of woods, where only treetrunks are left standing-wraiths of trees and where the bordering copses are all hacked or obliterated.

HE GERMANS DRIVEN FROM THEIR

THE GERMANS DRIVEN FROM

We have noted how the British lines had gained the top of the ridge along almost its whole extent and were even in some places reaching over the top and down on the other side. Many of the Germans were no longer living in their safe and comfortable dugouts, which a cockney private eulogized as "prime," a place where you could "generally always find a bit er suthin tasty, an' if yer strike a orficer's dugout it's a Lord Mayor's banquit fer certin." Instead, they were in very tentative quarters, for the most part, on the wrong slope of the ridge. An officer's letter gives a mournful picture of their condition beyond Pozières. "The wind-mill is over the hill. The hundreds of dead bodies make the air terrible, and there are flies in thousands

We have no dugouts. We dig a hole in the side of a shell-hole, and lie and get rheumatism. We get nothing to eat or drink. . The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad. Many of the men are knocked up." An indication of the weakening

morale of the defenders was observed in the increasing numbers of unwounded prisoners taken.

To open the way for the next step in advance, the British found it necessary to devote especial attention to an elaborate stronghold situated on a spur of land south of Thiepval, so sturdy a stronghold that it was known as the Wunderwerk. No power of engineering art had been spared in developing it. Before the valleys on either side could be entered or a move be made upon Courcelette and Martinpuich, this fortification must be demolished. On September 14, after two weeks of vigorous bombardment which had laid low all above-ground portions of the works and wrought havoc in some of the dugouts, the position was won by a part of Sir Hubert Gough's Army. Those of the garrison who remained were either killed in a fierce hand-to-hand encounter or driven by the onrush of the attacking party into the barrage that had been dropped beyond them when the charge began. Now that the Wunderwerk and the adjoining trenches had been secured, their wrecked fortifications were quickly turned into a strong position adjusted to protect the left centre of General Gough's forces in their progress during the coming offensive.

RITISH AND FRENCH PREPARE TO ACT

BRSIMULTANEOUSLY.

The special feature of this new attack compared with those preceding was that it should be a simultaneous movement of all the forces, British and French, between Thiepval and Vermandovillers; whereas, previously, the British divisions and the two bodies of French troops had acted independently and toward separate objectives. The plans about to be undertaken called for entire co-operation. From Le Sars to Morval, the last of the original German systems of defense was to receive the entire attention of Sir Henry Rawlinson's Army. In case the right wing were successful in reaching Morval, the attacking line on the left would be extended to include Courcelette and Martinpuich. In the section