d out to them with shrill words of praise and
exultation.

"Nous les aurons les sales Boches! Ah, ils sont foutus, ces bandits!
C'est la victoire, grace a vous, petits soldats anglais!"

Victory! The spirit of victory in the hearts of fighting men, and of
women excited by the sight of those bandaged heads, those bare, brawny
arms splashed with blood, those laughing heroes.

It looked like victory, in those days, as war correspondents, we were
not so expert in balancing the profit and loss as afterward we became.
When I went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last
Germans, who had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the
Yorkshires and Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had
been so humiliated at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when
the Manchesters and Gordons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban
and repulsed fierce counter-attacks.

It looked like victory, because of the German dead that lay there in
their battered trenches and the filth and stench of death over all that
mangled ground, and the enormous destruction wrought by our guns, and
the fury of fire which we were still pouring over the enemy's lines from
batteries which had moved forward.

I went down flights of steps into German dugouts, astonished by their
depth and strength. Our men did not build like this. This German
industry was a rebuke to us, yet we had captured their work and the
dead bodies of their laborers lay in those dark caverns, killed by our
bombers, who had flung down handgrenades. I drew back from those fat
corpses. They looked monstrous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul
litter of clothes, stickbombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of dead
lay in ditches which had once been trenches, flung into chaos by that
bombardment I had seen. They had been bayoneted. I remember one man, an
elderly fellow sitting up with his back to a bit of earth with his hands
half raised. He was smiling a little, though he had been stabbed through
the belly and was stone dead. Victory! some of the German dead were
young boys, too young to be killed for old men's crimes, and others
might have been old or young. One could not tell, because they had no
faces, and were just masses of raw flesh in rags and uniforms. Legs and
arms lay separate, without any bodies thereabouts.

Outside Montauban there was a heap of our own dead. Young Gordons and
Manchesters of the 30th Division, they had been caught by blas