inclosures.

These were days that were rich with results, days of harvest, indeed,
when the ceaseless fighting on the Ridge and the iron resolution of a
commander had its reward; when advances gathered in villages till the
British had taken thirty and the French, with fresh efforts after their
own chipping away at strong points, also had jumping-off places for
longer drives as they swung in with their right on the Somme in
combination with British attacks.

The two armies advanced as one on the 25th. The scene recalled the
splendor of the storming of Contalmaison which, if not for its waste and
horror, might lead men to go to war for the glory of the
panorama--glorious to the observer in this instance when he thought only
of the spectacle, in a moment of oblivion to the hard work of
preparation and the savage work of execution. Our route to a point of
observation for the attack which was at midday took us along the Road of
the Entente, as I called it, where French battalions marched with
British battalions, stately British motor trucks mixed with the lighter
French vehicles, and Gaul sat resting on one side of the road and Briton
on the other as German prisoners went by, and there was a mingling of
blue and khaki which are both of low visibility against the landscape
yet as distinct as the characters of the two races, each with its own
way of fighting true to racial bent yet accomplishing its purpose.

Just under the slope where we sat the British guns linked up with the
French. To the northward the British were visible right away past Ginchy
and Guillemont to Flers and the French clear to the Somme. We were
almost midway of a twelve-mile stretch of row upon row of flashes of
many calibers, the French more distinct at the foot of a slope
fearlessly in the open like the British, a long machine-loom of gunnery
with some monsters far back sending up great clouds of black smoke from
Mt. St. Quentin which hid our view of Peronne.

Now it was all together for the guns in the preliminary whirlwind, with
_soixante-quinzes_ ahead sparkling up and down like the flashes of an
automatic electric sign, making a great, thrumming beat of sound in the
valley, and the 120's near by doing their best, too, with their wicked
crashes, while the ridges beyond were a bobbing canopy of looming,
curling smoke. The units of the two armies might have been wired to a
single switchboard with heartbeats under blue and khaki jackets timed
togeth