the other fellow comes.

Thus the German depended on the machine gun and the rifle to stop any
charge which was not supported by artillery fire sufficient to crush in
the trenches and silence his armament. When it was, he had his own
artillery to turn a curtain of fire onto the charge in progress and to
hammer the enemy if he got possession. This was obviously the right
system--in theory. But the theory did not always work out, as we shall
see. Its development through the four months that I watched the Somme
battle was only less interesting than the development of offensive
tactics by the British and the French. Every day this terrible school of
war was in session, with a British battalion more skilful and cunning
every time that it went into the firing-line.

Rising out of the slopes toward the Ridge in green patches were three
large woods, not to mention small ones, under a canopy of shell-smoke,
Mametz, Bernafay and Trones, with their orgies of combat hidden under
their screens of foliage. They recall the Wilderness--a Wilderness
lasting for days, with only one feature of the Wilderness lacking which
was a conflagration, but with lachrymatory and gas shells and a few
other features that were lacking in Virginia. In the next war we may
have still more innovations. Ours is the ingenious human race.

It is Mametz with an area of something over two hundred acres that
concerns us now. The Germans thought highly of Mametz. They were
willing to lose thousands of lives in order to keep it in their
possession. For two years it had not been thinned according to French
custom; now shells and bullets were to undertake the task which had been
neglected. So thick was the undergrowth that a man had to squeeze his
way through and an enemy was as well ambushed as a field mouse in high
grass.

The Germans had run barriers of barbed wire through the undergrowth.
They had their artillery registered to fringe the woods with curtains of
fire and machine guns nestling in unseen barricades and trenches.
Through the heart of it they had a light railway for bringing up
supplies. All these details had been arranged in odd hours when they
were not working on the main first- and second-line fortifications during
their twenty months of preparation. I think they must have become weary
at times of so much "choring," judging by a German general's order after
his inspection of the second line, in which he said that the battalions
in occupation we