t is all.' Then that ceases, and now the wire is in again
perhaps for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time. Thus the night is
interrupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after the other,
each more terrifying than the other, of enormous losses through the
bombs and shells of the enemy, of huge masses of troops advancing upon
us, of all possible possibilities, such as a train broken down, and we
are tortured by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our nerves
quiver. We clench our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors of the
night."

Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy.

"Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out the
trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G-. We were
to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a
few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in every
limb, poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again."

Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not write about them.

The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to
all this welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the
cold, scientific spirit with which they regarded the problem of war. The
agony of the individual soldier would not trouble them. There is no war
without agony. But the psychology of masses of men had to be considered,
because it affects the efficiency of the machine.

The German General Staff on the western front was becoming seriously
alarmed by the declining morale of its infantry under the increasing
strain of the British attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it.
But it could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who were lying on
the battlefields, nor the maimed men who were being carried back to the
dressing stations, nor to bring back the prisoners taken in droves by
the French and British troops.

Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thiepval, and the
German debacle at Beaumont Hamel, in November, the enemy's command
was already filled with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its
fighting strength; was compelled to adopt new expedients for increasing
the number of its divisions. It was forced to withdraw troops badly
needed on other fronts, and the successive shocks of the British
offensive reached as far as Germany itself, so that the whole of its
recruiting system had to be revised to fill up the gaps torn out of the
German ranks.