llery fire
it is very seldom that nothing at all is hit.

The particular O Pip with which we are concerned at present, however,
is a German post--or was a fortnight ago, before the opening of the
Battle of the Somme.

For nearly two years the British Armies on the Western Front have been
playing for time. They have been sticking their toes in and holding
their ground, with numerically inferior forces and inadequate
artillery support, against a nation in arms which has set out, with
forty years of preparation at its back, to sweep the earth. We have
held them, and now _der Tag_ has come for us. The deal has passed
into our hand at last. A fortnight ago, ready for the first time to
undertake the offensive on a grand and prolonged scale,--Loos was a
mere reconnaissance compared with this,--the New British Army went
over the parapet shoulder to shoulder with the most heroic Army in the
world--the Army of France--and attacked over a sixteen-mile front in
the Valley of the Somme.

It was a critical day for the Allies: certainly it was a most critical
day in the history of the British Army. For on that day an answer
had to be given to a very big question indeed. Hitherto we had been
fighting on the defensive--unready, uphill, against odds. It would
have been no particular discredit to us had we failed to hold our
line. But we had held it, and more. Now, at last, we were ready--as
ready as we were ever likely to be. We had the men, the guns, and the
munitions. We were in a position to engage the enemy on equal, and
more than equal, terms. And the question that the British Empire had
to answer in that day, the First of July 1916, was this: "Are these
new amateur armies of ours, raised, trained, and equipped in less than
two years, with nothing in the way of military tradition to uphold
them--nothing but the steady courage of their race: are they a match
for, and more than a match for, that grim machine-made, iron-bound
host that lies waiting for them along that line of Picardy hills?
Because if they are _not_, we cannot win this war. We can only make a
stalemate of it."

We, looking back now over a space of twelve months, know how our boys
answered that question. In the greatest and longest battle that the
world had yet seen, that Army of city clerks, Midland farm-lads,
Lancashire mill-hands, Scottish miners, and Irish corner-boys, side
by side with their great-hearted brethren from Overseas, stormed
positions which had be