s
as soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their living flesh. In
six weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and Pozieres now is
an Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands there is to the
ghosts of that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau and
the slopes below. Many English boys of the Sussex, West Kents, Surrey,
and Warwick regiments, in the 18th Division, died at their side, not
less patient in sacrifice, not liking it better. Many Scots of the 15th
and 9th Divisions, many New-Zealanders, many London men of the 47th and
56th Divisions, fell, killed or wounded, to the right of them, on the
way to Martinpuich, and Eaucourt l'Abbaye and Flers, from High Wood
and Longueval, and Bazentin. The 3d Division of Yorkshires and
Northumberland Fusiliers, Royal Scots and Gordons, were earning that
name of the Iron Division, and not by any easy heroism. Every division
in the British army took its turn in the blood-bath of the Somme and was
duly blooded, at a cost of 25 per cent. and sometimes 50 per cent.
of their fighting strength. The Canadians took up the struggle
at Courcelette and captured it in a fierce and bloody battle. The
Australians worked up on the right of the Albert-Bapaume road to Thilloy
and Ligny Thilloy. On the far left the fortress of Thiepval had fallen
at last after repeated and frightful assaults, which I watched from
ditches close enough to see our infantry--Wiltshires and Worcesters of
the 25th Division--trudging through infernal fire. And then at
last, after five months of superhuman effort, enormous sacrifice,
mass-heroism, desperate will-power, and the tenacity of each individual
human ant in this wild ant-heap, the German lines were smashed,
the Australians surged into Bapaume, and the enemy, stricken by the
prolonged fury of our attack, fell back in a far and wide retreat across
a country which he laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line,
from Bullecourt to St.-Quentin.

XIX

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume
after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering
nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage,
not much difference in average of loss. By the end of that year's
fighting our casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four
hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our
graveyards were growing forests of little white crosses. The Ger