XXII

All through July and August the enemy's troops fought with wonderful and
stubborn courage, defending every bit of broken woodland, every heap of
bricks that was once a village, every line of trenches smashed by heavy
shell-fire, with obstinacy.

It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those battles of the
Somme our men fought against an enemy hard to beat, grim and resolute,
and inspired sometimes with the courage of despair, which was hardly
less dangerous than the courage of hope.

The Australians who struggled to get the high ground at Pozieres did not
have an easy task. The enemy made many counter-attacks against them. All
the ground thereabouts was, as I have said, so smashed that the earth
became finely powdered, and it was the arena of bloody fighting at close
quarters which did not last a day or two, but many weeks. Mouquet Farm
was like the phoenix which rose again out of its ashes. In its tunneled
ways German soldiers hid and came out to fight our men in the rear long
after the site of the farm was in our hands.

But the German troops were fighting what they knew to be a losing
battle. They were fighting rear-guard actions, trying to gain time for
the hasty digging of ditches behind them, trying to sell their lives at
the highest price.

They lived not only under incessant gun-fire, gradually weakening their
nerve-power, working a physical as well as a moral change in them, but
in constant terror of British attacks.

They could never be sure of safety at any hour of the day or night, even
in their deepest dugouts. The British varied their times of attack. At
dawn, at noon, when the sun was reddening in the west, just before the
dusk, in pitch darkness, even, the steady, regular bombardment that had
never ceased all through the days and nights would concentrate into the
great tumult of sudden drum-fire, and presently waves of men--English
or Scottish or Irish, Australians or Canadians--would be sweeping on
to them and over them, rummaging down into the dugouts with bombs and
bayonets, gathering up prisoners, quick to kill if men were not quick to
surrender.

In this way Thiepval was encircled so that the garrison there--the 180th
Regiment, who had held it for two years--knew that they were doomed. In
this way Guillemont and Ginchy fell, so that in the first place hardly a
man out of two thousand men escaped to tell the tale of horror in German
lines, and in the second place t