defensive points
that could possibly be conceived, and chosen by men who made a special
study of such positions. The whole place was thickly planted with
machine-guns, so cunningly concealed that it was impossible to observe
them until one was practically at the gun's mouth.

To get here it was necessary to go down a long steep glacis, then up
another to the farm. The Germans, with their network of underground
passages and dug-outs, were able to concentrate at any threatened point
with their machine-guns in such a manner that they would have our troops
under a continual stream of lead for quite one thousand yards without a
vestige of cover. The farm had been shelled by our artillery time after
time, until the whole ground for miles round was one huge mass of
shell-craters, but the Germans, in their dug-outs forty and fifty feet
underground, could not be reached by shell-fire. I will not go into
details of how the place was eventually taken by the Midlanders--it will
remain an epic of the war.

The weather was now breaking up. Cold winds and rain continually swept
over the whole Somme district, invariably accompanied by thick mists. I
wanted to obtain a film showing the fearful mud conditions, which we
were working hard and fighting in and under. And such mud! You could not
put the depth in inches. Nothing so ordinary; it was feet deep. I have
known relief battalions take six hours to reach their allotted position
in the front line, when, in the dry season, the same journey could be
accomplished in an hour; and the energy expended in wading through such
a morass can be imagined. Many times I have got stuck in the clayey
slime well above my knees and have required the assistance of two, and
sometimes three men to help me out. To turn oneself into a lump of mud,
all one had to do was to walk down to the front line; you would
undoubtedly be taken for a part of the parapet by the time you arrived.
I asked a Tommy once what he thought of it.

"Sir," he replied, "there ain't no blooming word to describe it!" And I
think he was right.

On one journey, when filming the carrying of munitions by mule-back--as
that was the only method by which our advanced field-guns could be
supplied--while they were being loaded at a dump near ---- Wood, the mud
was well above the mules' knees, and, in another instance, it was
actually touching their bellies. In such conditions our men were
fighting and winning battles, and not once did I hea