difficult to
throw oneself back into the mood of even six weeks ago! History is
coming so fast off the loom! And yet six weeks ago I stood at the
pregnant beginnings of it all, when, though nature in the bitter frost
and slush of early March showed no signs of spring, the winter lull was
over, and everywhere on the British front men knew that great things
were stirring.

Before I reached G.H.Q., Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had already
reported the recapture or surrender of eleven villages on the Ancre
during February, including Serre and Gommecourt, which had defied our
efforts in the summer of 1916. That is to say, after three months of
trench routine and trench endurance imposed by a winter which seemed to
have let loose every possible misery of cold and wet, of storm and
darkness, on the fighting hosts in France, the battle of the Somme had
moved steadily forward again from the point it had reached in November.
Only, when the curtain rose on the new scene it was found that during
these three months strange things had been happening.

About the middle of November, after General Gough's brilliant strokes on
the Ancre, which gave us St. Pierre Divion, Beaucourt, and Beaumont
Hamel, and took us up to the outskirts of Grandcourt, the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_ wrote--"For us Germans the days of the crisis on the Somme are
over. Let the French and English go on sacrificing the youth of their
countries here. They will not thereby achieve anything more." Yet when
this was written the German Higher Command was already well aware that
the battle of the Somme had been won by the Allies, and that it would be
impossible for Germany to hold out on the same ground against another
similar attack.

Three months, however, of an extraordinarily hard winter gave them a
respite, and enabled them to veil the facts from their own people. The
preparations for retirement, which snow and fog and the long nights of
January helped them to conceal in part from our Air Service, must have
actually begun not many weeks after General Gough's last successes on
the Ancre, when the British advance paused, under stress of weather,
before Grandcourt and Bapaume. So that in the latter half of February,
when General Gough again pushed forward, it was to feel the German line
yielding before him; and by March 3rd, the day of my visit to the Somme,
it was only a question of how far the Germans would go and what the
retreat meant.

Meanwhile, in another se