at close-quarter work, is an invitation to utter
destruction if it is caught by the guns before it can move. And so this
time it was caught. Given their target, given the word "Go," the guns
wasted no moment. The first battery ready burst a quick couple of
ranging shots over the wood. A spray of torn leaves whirling from the
tree tops, the toss of a broken branch, showed the range correct; and
before the first rounds' solid white cotton-wooly balls of smoke had
thinned and disappeared, puff-puff-puff the shrapnel commenced to burst
in clouds over the wood. That was the beginning. Gun after gun, battery
after battery, picked up the range and poured shells over and into the
wood, went searching every hollow and hole, rending and destroying
trench and dug-out, parapet and parados. The trenches, clean white
streaks and zig-zags of chalk on a green slope, made perfect targets on
which the guns made perfect shooting; the wood was a mark that no gun
could miss, and surely no gun missed. What the scene in that wood must
have been is beyond imagining and beyond telling. It was quickly
shrouded in a pall of drifting smoke, and dimly through this the
observing officers directing the fire of their guns could see clouds of
leaves and twigs whirling and leaping under the lashing shrapnel, could
see branches and smashed tree-trunks and great clods of earth and stone
flying upward and outward from the blast of the lyddite shells. The
wood was slashed to ribbons, rent and riddled to tatters, deluged from
above with tearing blizzards of shrapnel bullets, scorched and riven
with high-explosive shells. In the trenches our men cowered at first,
listening in awe to the rushing whirlwinds of the shells' passage over
their heads, the roar of the cannonade behind them, the crash and boom
of the bursting shells in front, the shriek and whirr of flying
splinters, the splintering crash of the shattering trees.

The German artillery strove to pick up the plan of the attack, to beat
down the torrent of our batteries' fire, to smash in the forward
trenches, shake the defense, open the way for the massed attack. But
the contest was too unequal, the devastation amongst the crowded mass
of German infantry too awful to be allowed to continue. Plainly the
attack, ready or not ready, had to be launched at speed, or perish
where it stood.

And so it was that our New Armies had a glimpse of what the old
"Contemptible Little Army" has seen and faced so ofte