e was an ally of soldierly industry in constructing defenses. The
German staff expected the brunt of the offensive in this sector and
every hour's delay in the attack was invaluable for their final
preparations. Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel and Gommecourt would not be
yielded if there were any power of men or material at German command to
keep them. Indeed, the Germans said that Thiepval was impregnable. Their
boast was good on July 1st but not in the end, as we shall see, for,
before the summer was over, Thiepval was to be taken with less loss to
the British than to the defenders.

At Beaumont-Hamel and Thiepval, particularly, and in all villages house
cellars had been enlarged and connected by new galleries, the debris
from the buildings forming a thicker roof against penetration by shells.
Where there had seemed no life in Beaumont-Hamel battalions were snug in
their refuges as the earth around trembled from the explosions. Those
shell-threshed parapets of the first-line German trenches which appeared
to represent complete destruction had not filled in all the doorways of
dugouts which big shells had failed to reach. The cut and twisted
fragments of barbed wire which were the remains of the maze of
entanglements fringing the parapets no longer protected them from a
charge; but the garrisons depended upon another kind of defense which
sent its deadly storms against the advancing infantry.

The British battalions that went over the parapet from Thiepval
northward were of the same mettle as those that took Montauban and
Mametz; their training and preparation the same. Where battalions to the
southward swept forward according to plan and the guns' pioneering was
successful, those on this front in many cases started from trenches
already battered in by German shell fire. A few steps across that dead
space and officers knew that the supporting artillery, working no less
thoroughly in its preliminary bombardment here than elsewhere, had not
the situation in hand.

All the guns which the Germans had brought up during the time that
weather delayed the British attack added their weight to the artillery
concentration. Down the valley of the Ancre at its bend they had more or
less of an enfilade. Machine guns had survived in their positions in the
debris of the trenches or had been mounted overnight and others appeared
from manholes in front of the trenches. Sprays of bullets cut crosswise
of the blasts of the German curtains of a