h of
the Ancre.

Even before the British infantry had left their trenches at dawn on July
1st, German officers behind the firing--lines saw with anxiety that
all the organization which had worked so smoothly in times of ordinary
trench--warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under a deadly
storm of shells.

Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to front-line
trenches without many casualties, and sometimes could not be sent up
at all. Telephone wires were cut, and communications broken between the
front and headquarters staffs. Staff-officers sent up to report were
killed on the way to the lines. Troops moving forward from reserve areas
came under heavy fire and lost many men before arriving in the support
trenches.

Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, sitting aloof from all this in personal
safety, must have known before July 1st that his resources in men and
material would be strained to the uttermost by the British attack, but
he could take a broader view than men closer to the scene of battle, and
taking into account the courage of his troops (he had no need to doubt
that), the immense strength of their positions, dug and tunneled beyond
the power of high explosives, the number of his machine-guns, the
concentration of his artillery, and the rawness of the British troops,
he could count up the possible cost and believe that in spite of a heavy
price to pay there would be no break in his lines.

At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left
their trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt,
Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward
from Fricourt, below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German
troops--Bavarians and Prussians--had been crouching in their dugouts,
listening to the ceaseless crashing of the British "drum-fire." In
places like Beaumont Hamel, the men down in the deep tunnels--some of
them large enough to hold a battalion and a half--were safe as long as
they stayed there. But to get in or out was death. Trenches disappeared
into a sea of shell-craters, and the men holding them--for some men had
to stay on duty there--were blown to fragments.

Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and
officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days
of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban. The living men kept their
courage, but below ground, under that tumult of bursting shells, and