the
battle will show better than a page of description why it was necessary
that Pozieres should next be captured.

There were several days' interval between the failure of the first
attack on Pozieres and the night on which the Australians were put at
it. The Germans probably had little chance of improving their position
in the meanwhile, for the village was kept under a slow bombardment with
heavy shells and shrapnel which made movement there dangerous. Our
troops could see occasional parties of Germans hurrying through the
tattered wood and powdered, tumbled foundations. The garrison lost men
steadily, and on about the night of Thursday or Friday, July 20th or
21st, the Second Guard Reserve Division, which had been mainly
responsible for holding this part of the line, was relieved; and a fresh
division, from the lines in front of Ypres, was put in. The new troops
brought in several days' rations with them, and never lacked food or
water. It was probably a belated party of these new-comers that our men
noticed wandering through the village in daytime.

During the afternoon of Saturday our bombardment of Pozieres became
heavier. Most of these ruined villages are marked on this shell-swept
country by the trees around them. It is not that they originally stood
in a woodland; but when the village is a mere heap of foundations
powdered white the only relic of it left standing erect, if you except a
battered wall or two, is the shredded trunks and stumps of trees which
once made the gardens or orchards or hedges behind the houses. Our
troops had three obstacles before them--first a shallow, hastily dug
trench in the open in front of the trees around the village; then
certain trenches running generally through the trees and hedges and
behind a trench railway; thirdly, such lines as existed in the village
itself. The village is strung out along a stretch of the Albert-Bapaume
road up which the battle has advanced from the first. Just beyond the
village, near what remains of the Pozieres Mill on the very top of the
hill, is the German second line still (at time of writing) in possession
of the Germans. Another line crossing the road in front of the village
was then in their hands.

On Saturday afternoon our heavy shells were tearing at regular intervals
into the rear of the brickheaps which once were houses, and flinging up
branches of trees and great clouds of black earth from the woods. A
German letter was found next day