eft nothing
but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I went walking
with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being shelled
in that place.

Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road, there had
been a village called Ovillers. It was no longer there. Our guns has
removed every trace of it, except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick.
The Germans had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches and
their dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th Division was ordered
to drive them out--a division of English county troops, including the
Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex--and those country boys of ours
fought their way among communication trenches, burrowed into tunnels,
crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and with bombs and bayonets
and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, and
any weapon that would kill, gained yard by yard over the dead bodies
of the enemy, or by the capture of small batches of cornered men,
until after seventeen days of this one hundred and forty men of the
3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their garrison, without food or water,
raised a signal of surrender, and came out with their hands up. Ovillers
was a shambles, in a fight of primitive earth-men like human beasts. Yet
our men were not beast-like. They came out from those places--if they
had the luck to come out--apparently unchanged, without any mark of
the beast on them, and when they cleansed themselves of mud and filth,
boiled the lice out of their shirts, and assembled in a village street
behind the lines, they whistled, laughed, gossiped, as though nothing
had happened to their souls--though something had really happened, as
now we know.

It was not until July 14th that our High Command ordered another general
attack after the local fighting which had been in progress since the
first day of battle. Our field-batteries, and some of our "heavies," had
moved forward to places like Montauban and Contalmaison--where German
shells came searching for them all day long--and new divisions had been
brought up to relieve some of the men who had been fighting so hard and
so long. It was to be an attack on the second German line of defense on
the ridges by the village of Bazentin le Grand and Bazentin le Petit to
Longueval on the right and Delville Wood. I went up in the night to see
the bombardment and the beginning of the battle and the swirl of its
backwash, and I