and Stonewall Jackson believed in
it, and nothing throughout the Somme battle was so characteristically
British as not only the stubbornness of their defense when small parties
were surrounded, but the way in which they would keep on attacking and
the difficulty which generals had not in encouraging initiative but in
keeping battalions and brigades from putting into practice their
conviction that they could take a position on their own account if they
could have a chance instead of waiting on a systematic advance.

Thus, an attack on that second line on the Ridge after the Germans had
had two weeks of further preparation was an adventure of an order, in
the days of mechanical transport, aeroplanes and indirect artillery fire
when all military science is supposed to be reduced to a factory system,
worthy of the days of the sea-rovers and of Clive, of Washington's
crossing of the Delaware or of the storming of Quebec, when a bold
confidence made gamble for a mighty stake.

So, at least, it seemed to the observer, though, as I said, the staff
insisted that it was a perfectly normal operation. The Japanese had
made many successful night attacks early in the Russo-Japanese war, but
these had been against positions undefended by machine gun fire and
curtains of artillery fire. When the Japanese reached their objective
they were not in danger of being blasted out by high explosives and
incidentally they were not fighting what has been called the most highly
trained army on earth on the most concentrated front that has ever been
known in military history.

But "Up and at them!" Sir Douglas Haig, who had "all his nerve with
him," said to go ahead. At three-thirty a.m., a good hour before dawn,
that wave of men three miles long was to rush into the night toward an
invisible objective, with the darkness so thick that they could hardly
recognize a figure ten yards away. Yet as one English soldier said, "You
could see the German as soon as he saw you and you ought to be able to
throw a bomb as quickly as he and a bayonet would have just as much
penetration at three-thirty in the morning as at midday."

When I saw the battalions who were to take part in the attack marching
up I realized, as they did not, the splendid and terrible hazard of
success or failure, of life or death, which was to be theirs. Along the
new roads they passed and then across the conquered ground, its uneven
slopes made more uneven by continued digging and sh