From "light" cases and from "bad" cases, from officers and men, you had
the account of an individual's supreme experience, infinitesimal
compared to the whole but when taken together making up the whole. The
wounded in the Thiepval-Gommecourt sector spoke of having "crawled" back
across No Man's Land. South of Thiepval they had "walked" back. This,
too, told the story of the difference between repulse and victory.

As the fight went for each man in the fray, so the battle went to his
conception. The spectator going here and there could hear accounts at
one headquarters of battalions that were beyond the first-line trenches
and at another of battalions whose survivors were back in their own
trenches. He could hear one wounded man say: "It was too stiff, sir.
There was no getting through their curtains of fire against their
machine guns, sir;" and another: "We went into their first line without
a break and right on, gathering in Boches on the way."

Victory is sweet. It writes itself. Perhaps because failure is harder to
write, though in this case it is equally glorious, we shall have this
first. To make the picture of that day clearer, imagine a movement of
the whole arm, with the shoulder at Gommecourt and the fist swinging in
at Montauban, crushing its way against those fortifications. It broke
through for a distance of more than from the elbow to the fingers' ends
twenty miles southward from Thiepval--a name to bear in mind. Men
crossing the open under protecting waves of shell fire had proved that
men in dugouts with machine guns were not invincible.

From a certain artillery observation post in a tree you had a good view
of Thiepval, already a blackened spot with the ruins of the chateau
showing white in its midst and pricked by the toothpick-like trunks of
trees denuded of their limbs, which were to become such a familiar sight
on the battlefield. It was uphill all the way to Thiepval for the
British. A river so-called, really a brook, the Ancre, runs at the foot
of the slope and turns eastward beyond Thiepval, where a ridge called
Crucifix Ridge north-east of the village takes its name from a Christ
with outstretched arms visible for many miles around. Then on past the
bend of the Ancre the British and the German positions continued to the
Gommecourt salient.

Along these five miles the odds of terrain were all against the British.
The high ground which they sought to gain was of supreme tactical value.
Natur