ty strong--after a desperate and
gallant resistance in ditches and tunnels, where they had fought to the
last, surrendered with honor.

Then began the long battle of the woods--Devil's Wood, High Wood, Trones
Wood--continued through August with most fierce and bloody fighting,
which ended in our favor and forced the enemy back, gradually but
steadily, in spite of the terrific bombardments which filled those
woods with shell-fire and the constant counter-attacks delivered by the
Germans.

"Counter-attack!" came the order from the German staff, and battalions
of men marched out obediently to certain death, sometimes with
incredible folly on the part of their commanding officers, who ordered
these attacks to be made without the slightest chance of success.

I saw an example of that at close range during a battle at Falfemont
Farm, near Guillemont. Our men had advanced from Wedge Wood, and I
watched them from a trench just south of this, to which I had gone at
a great pace over shell-craters and broken wire, with a young observing
officer who had been detailed to report back to the guns. (Old
"Falstaff," whose songs and stories had filled the tent under the
Red Cross with laughter, toiled after us gallantly, but grunting and
sweating under the sun like his prototype, until we lost him in our
hurry.) Presently a body of Germans came out of a copse called Leuze
Wood, on rising ground, faced round among the thin, slashed trees of
Falfemont, and advanced toward our men, shoulder to shoulder, like a
solid bar. It was sheer suicide. I saw our men get their machineguns
into action, and the right side of the living bar frittered away, and
then the whole line fell into the scorched grass. Another line followed.
They were tall men, and did not falter as they came forward, but it
seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to death. They
died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some invisible
scythe had mown them down.

In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting and captured
by us from dead or living men there was one cry of agony and horror.

"I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my life," wrote one
of them. "They were those of the battle of the Somme. It began with a
night attack on August 13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the evening
of the 18th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters of blood,
'It is all over with you.' A handful of half-mad, wretched creature