and from instant to instant the vivid sunlight is painted with a flash of red flame, and the air is shaken with a fierce concussion. And these guns are themselves an army; not by ones and twos are they reckoned, but by thousands. Behind them, withdrawn with a sort of stately majesty from the storm of battle, are the mightiest guns of all, with their long black barrels pointing with a hungry menace towards the German front. Great is the roar of their voices, blinding the flash of their flame, swift is their sudden recoil, as they send their envoys flying through the heavens, to where the Boche believes himself secure. with ambulances and despatchriders, and so great is the congestion of traffic that from time to time it is held up as in a London thoroughfare. Along this road there come marching a dishevelled and broken company of men, the first of the German prisoners taken in this sector of the British advance. A couple of German shells might sweep the whole three hundred of them away, so closely are they packed along the narrow road. At their head comes a corporal of the Guards, with three Prussian officers who have surrendered to him. A cigarette in his mouth, his steel helmet at an angle on his head, the sweat and dust of battle on his brick-red face; he is in high feather. "These here fellers," says he, "comes along and surrenders to me." "Oh yes," as "Orficers?" he casts a patronising look at them; "they're Orficers. One chap there's got the Iron Cross, and some of our fellers wanted to take it from him, but Disciplīne, says I; you just leave that there sooveneer alone." One of the captives still wears his heavy German helmet, the others stand with their closecropped bullet-heads bare to the autumn sun. One is a spectacled person with a bandaged face, the other two big men of the bullying type-not gentlemen according to our ways of thinking-who are promoted for their animal strength and power to lead; and they show this in the half-defiant, explosive way in which they reply to the General's questions. But it is evident that they have been much shaken, and the big man with the Iron Cross shrinks with a curious physical wincing from the General's hand, as though he feared a personal assault. But the General is chivalry itself. "Quite right, Corporal," he says; "remember that they are officers, and see that they are treated as such; and look here," he adds, "you take my advice and put that Iron Cross of yours into your pocket, it will be safer there; and remember, we treat you like gentlemen, which is more than you do to our officers." A look of relief sweeps over the man's face, he clicks his heels, and says "Yes, Generall," and removing his badge of valour puts it inside his pocket. "Mustn't put temptation in 1 A correspondent of The Morning Post,' writing on the day of the battle, describes how he met these prisoners at a later stage. "As the victors of Lesbœufs and their companions, the besiegers of Gueudicourt, kept streaming into the field ambulance, the road alongside their dressingstation held groups of forlorn wholly discouraged prisoners. Most of them were hatless; one or two wore their cumbrous sniper's helmet; one had on a British metal helmet. One group of perhaps a hundred Prussians-two hatless dignified officers among them-halted just beyond the field ambulance to rest beside the road. Then I witnessed what I think is one of the strangest scenes of this great battle. Curious but not unfriendly British soldiers grouped around the Prussians, looked at them, and even gave them cigarettes. The stout hatless lieutenant, who had commanded a company of the 240th Regiment, stood bolt upright in the centre of such a group, with his spectacled second-in-command -a slender beardless youth, whose head was bandaged—beside him. He was impassive, even dignified, quite cool, stiffly courteous in intelligible English when questioned. The ribbon of the Iron Cross was on his dusty tunic. A British soldier asked to see the Cross itself. The lieutenant gripped his tunic pocket and tightened his lips. 'Your General,' he said, 'told me that I should keep my-my'-(he searched through his rusty English for a word)—' should keep my little souvenir that I have win.' "Tell him we don't want it,' said the soldier to the other officer, whose English was less painful. We only want to look at it.' "The young man explained rapidly. His companion looked less perturbed. He thrust his hand into his tunic and brought out the black metal cross he had received for valour. The soldiers fingered it curiously, and handed it back. Again the lieutenant held it up so that those behind could see, then thrust it back into his pocket." satisfaction, transfers it from unburied. Every inch of the his lips to those of his late enemy. This war is a hard war, that is going to be fought to a finish; and in those bloodstained trenches yonder, where Boche and Briton meet in the heat of battle, there is apt to be little quarter, especially when the Briton is a man with a bayonet from Overseas. But hereabouts, where the field has been won, the Boche is treated with a good-natured toleration and plenty of rough kindness. "Why, bless your heart, they treat 'em like tame rabbits; make pets of them," says the General, laughing grimly at some of these incidents. The Boche, as we know, does not respond in kind. Sixteen prisoners taken at Thiepval, as they came down the road in the care of two British infantrymen, suddenly turned on their captors and severely mauled them, and would have killed them both but for the unexpected arrival of help. The prisoners pass on, but the battle goes forward with an increasing wrath. The air is violent with the crossing and re-crossing thunder of the guns; the wounded come trooping in with bandaged hands and feet and bloody heads; the R.A.M.C. ambulances fill the thoroughfares on their way to the Advanced Dressing Stations; dead horses lie by the wayside, a prey to the clustering flies; the ground under our feet is littered with the débris of battle and scarred with shell-holes. Beyond that wood the enemy's dead still lie soil we stand on has been fought over in the great advance, and the landmarks about us-Longueval, Montauban, Contalmaison- are already an immortal part of the history of Great Britain. Over there in London streets the newsboys will soon soon be shouting of the latest British victory on the Somme; of the taking of thousands of prisoners; of the fall of Gueudicourt, of Lesbœufs, of Morval; of the fight for Combles, of the gallantry of the GuardsEnglishmen, Irishmen (somewhere ahead in that front of battle the Prince of Wales is "doing his bit"); of the decline in the morale of the Boche; but here these things are actually happening, and, even as we stand upon their fringe, the tide of battle is rolling forward, and the harvest of Death and Victory is being gathered in. Beyond Montauban there grins the skeleton of Bernafay Wood; beyond it the path runs on for Guillemont and Combles, under the Bois des Trones. It is here upon the edge of the rising ground that we stand to observe the progress of the battle. Upon our right front, in a hollow, lies the fortified village of Combles; but so subterranean are these modern positions, that we can form no conception of its strength. A little beyond it, on our right, the French battle is going forward; we can hear the mitrailleuse, the rending music of the 75's; we can see the long avenues of trees on the Peronne Bapaume read, where our gallant allies are at grips with the Boche at Rancourt, cutting his connection with Peronne. Straight ahead of us lies Guillemont, beyond it, on rising ground, Morval and Lesboeufs; and it is there that the fierce fighting of the first line is in progress; that the bomb and the machine-gun, the hand grenade and the cold steel of the British bayonet, are murderously at work; and it is there also that the German barrage fire is concentrated, leaving us just behind it, immune. A thousand guns are pouring their shells into this portion of the Front alone. Of the gallantry of our men, of the close and bitter fighting in that hell, of the deadly handgrips of men who must kill or be killed, we can see nothing from here. Their record is told to the writers of history by the returning victors. But we can see the white seamy lines of the trenches, the black smokefountains of the falling shells, the sudden flame of the guns in the brilliant sunlight, and then from time to time the receding harvest of battle, the captives and the wounded. ... The Dead we cannot see. For all who are over there it is a great lottery; and no man who goes into the fight ean be anything but a Fatalist. He is moved from one end of the battle-line to another at the will of a higher command; he is hit or not, killed or wounded, touched or maimed for life, under the blind play of Chance. There is a native valour which sustains men in the hour of danger; a courage greater, or some physical reaction more intense, that inspires one man to deeds more daring than those of another; but there is also in these great battles of munitions and transcendent material forces the sure knowledge that there is little a man can do that will change or deflect his destiny. are Observe this congested road upon which these men moving, these batteries beside it belching their flame and wrath; does any one here, I wonder, save the one or two who are free to retire, feel that he has any control over the business of Life or Death? He must know well that he has none. A blind Fate rules over all. Even we realise this as a couple of isolated shells fall beside us in the blistered soil, flinging up great jets of earth, filling the air with their violence of sound. All the foresight, all the prudence and care that you and I, dear sir, take to arrange our lives, to secure this or that of happiness or prosperity, is here brutally negatived. An insensate Fate drives on, heedless of whom it spares and whom it kills. We had tea in a Field Ambulance tent, where upon the long deal table thin slices of bread-and-butter were cut and laid as neatly as when the demure maid brings the tea into an English drawing-room. Outside the ground was littered with "souvenirs," with trench mortars, unexploded shells, hand grenades, and all the jetsam ing the Frankenstein monster of battle. Through the open flaps of the tent we could see the dark columns of smoke, the silvery Drachens in the sky, the bursting clouds of shrapnel, and the sound that filled our ears was a sound such as has never before been heard upon this earth. Yet even here the din of battle was abroad. Some of the heaviest guns were hidden here, their long threatening muzzles directed towards the enemy's lines, and the red sunlight grew redder with their flame, and the earth shook with their impact and music of sound. It was here, too, that the graves of departed warriors lay like an army in line: Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Celts, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Australians, New Zealanders, men of the North and men of the South, all lay here sleeping their last sleep together side by side. "Ils ont voulu s'enraciner sur le sol de France. Qu'ils y demeurent à jamais ensevelis," said a Frenchman in the bitterness of his heart, as he passed these German graves. But we must be gentle with the dead. Such was the Battle of the Somme as I saw it in the course of one eventful day. Its ultimate impression that survives is as of some vast material force at work, some mighty organisation—of a war of munitions, transport, apparatus; but side by side with these mechanic things, inspir with human passion and life, were a gallantry and valour unsurpassed-if they have ever been equalled-in the history of the world; cold and unmoved here in the second line; fierce and pitiless there in the couloirs and avenues of Death; genial and tolerant once the point of victory has been reached, the enemy beaten. It was indeed the British spirit and temper that I looked upon; and as the men served the great guns with a leisured. speed, moved without visible emotion into the fighting zone, returned with the dust and sweat of battle on their humorous faces, ignoring their wounds and indulging their enemies, I understood why, if we are slow at the start, we never fail to win at the finish. The Boche saw our easy, tolerant, individual outlook on life, and in the pride of his jealous heart said he would overcome us by his cold and scientific organisation, the secret, devilish preparation of years. He would take from us the beautiful thing we had made, and besmirch our ideals with his own. But he reckoned without the British spirit-just that fibre of individual thought and feeling of which we are made. And now that we have drawn up to a level with him in this matter of guns and mechanism, who can doubt, who has seen them together in these naked moments on the battlefield, that the Britisher is a bigger man than the Boche? We are beating him now at |