hey had held for a break-through on both sides of
the German positions. Rumors came to us that the Commander-in-Chief had
decided to restrict future operations to minor actions for strengthening
the line and to abandon the great offensive. It was believed by officers
I met that Sir Henry Rawlinson was arguing, persuading, in favor of
continued assaults on the grand scale.

Whatever division of opinion existed in the High Command I do not know;
it was visible to all of us that for some days there were uncertainty
of direction, hesitation, conflicting orders. On July 7th the 17th
Division, under General Pilcher, attacked Contalmaison, and a whole
battalion of the Prussian Guard hurried up from Valenciennes and, thrown
on to the battlefield without maps or guidance, walked into the barrage
which covered the advance of our men and were almost annihilated. But
although some bodies of our men entered Contalmaison, in an attack which
I was able to see, they were smashed out of it again by storms of fire
followed by masses of men who poured out from Mametz Wood. The Welsh
were attacking Mametz Wood.

They were handled, as Marbot said of his men in a Napoleonic battle,
"like turnips." Battalion commanders received orders in direct conflict
with one another. Bodies of Welshmen were advanced, and then retired,
and left to lie nakedly without cover, under dreadful fire. The 17th
Division, under General Pilcher, did not attack at the expected time.
There was no co-ordination of divisions; no knowledge among battalion
officers of the strategy or tactics of a battle in which their men were
involved.

"Goodness knows what's happening," said an officer I met near Mametz. He
had been waiting all night and half a day with a body of troops who had
expected to go forward, and were still hanging about under harassing
fire.

On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that attack very clearly, so
clearly that I could almost count the bricks in the old chateau set in
a little wood, and saw the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct
hit of a fifteen-inch shell. At four o'clock in the afternoon our guns
concentrated on the village, and under the cover of that fire our men
advanced on three sides of it, hemmed it in, and captured it with the
garrison of the 122d Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies of
hell inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this time
German shells smashed into the chateau and the cottages and l