notonous, dull, familiar. The mass
followed their lead, and even poor coward-hearts, of whom there were
many, as in all armies, had courage enough, as a rule, to get as far as
the center of the fury before their knees gave way or they dropped dead.

Each wave of boyhood that came out from England brought a new mass of
physical and spiritual valor as great as that which was spent, and in
the end it was an irresistible tide which broke down the last barriers
and swept through in a rush to victory, which we gained at the cost
of nearly a million dead, and a high sum of living agony, and all our
wealth, and a spiritual bankruptcy worse than material loss, so that
now England is for a time sick to death and drained of her old pride and
power.

VI

I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred years
ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the Somme.
With a group of officers I stood on the high ground above Albert,
looking over to Gommecourt and Thiepval and La Boisselle, on the left
side of the German salient, and then, by crossing the road, to Fricourt,
Mametz, and Montauban on the southern side. From Albert westward past
Thiepval Wood ran the little river of the Ancre, and on the German side
the ground rose steeply to Usna Hill by La Boisselle, and to Thiepval
Chateau above the wood. It was a formidable defensive position, one
fortress girdled by line after line of trenches, and earthwork redoubts,
and deep tunnels, and dugouts in which the German troops could live
below ground until the moment of attack. The length of our front of
assault was about twenty miles round the side of the salient to the
village of Bray, on the Somme, where the French joined us and continued
the battle.

From where we stood we could see a wide panorama of the German
positions, and beyond, now and then, when the smoke of shellfire
drifted, I caught glimpses of green fields and flower patches beyond the
trench lines, and church spires beyond the range of guns rising above
clumps of trees in summer foliage. Immediately below, in the foreground,
was the village of Albert, not much ruined then, with its red-brick
church and tower from which there hung, head downward, the Golden Virgin
with her Babe outstretched as though as a peace-offering over all this
strife. That leaning statue, which I had often passed on the way to the
trenches, was now revealed brightly with a golden glamour, as sheets of
fla