the
Germans desired to hold at all costs, and had held against incessant
attacks by great concentration of artillery, was captured and left
behind by the London men. A new engine of war had come as a demoralizing
influence among German troops, spreading terror among them on the first
day out of the tanks. For the first time the Germans were outwitted in
inventions of destruction; they who had been foremost in all engines
of death. It was the moment of real panic in the German lines--a panic
reaching back from the troops to the High Command.

Ten days later, on September 25th, when the British made a new
advance--all this time the French were pressing forward, too, on our
right by Roye--Combles was evacuated without a fight and with a litter
of dead in its streets; Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs, and Morval were lost by
the Germans; and a day later Thiepval, the greatest fortress position
next to Beaumont Hamel, fell, with all its garrison taken prisoners.

They were black days in the German headquarters, where staff-officers
heard the news over their telephones and sent stern orders to artillery
commanders and divisional generals, and after dictating new instructions
that certain trench systems must be held at whatever price, heard that
already they were lost.

It was at this time that the morale of the German troops on the Somme
front showed most signs of breaking. In spite of all their courage,
the ordeal had been too hideous for them, and in spite of all their
discipline, the iron discipline of the German soldier, they were on the
edge of revolt. The intimate and undoubted facts of this break in the
morale of the enemy's troops during this period reveal a pitiful picture
of human agony.

"We are now fighting on the Somme with the English," wrote a man of
the 17th Bavarian Regiment. "You can no longer call it war. It is mere
murder. We are at the focal-point of the present battle in Foureaux
Wood (near Guillemont). All my previous experiences in this war--the
slaughter at Ypres and the battle in the gravel-pit at Hulluch--are the
purest child's play compared with this massacre, and that is much too
mild a description. I hardly think they will bring us into the fight
again, for we are in a very bad way."

"From September 12th to 27th we were on the Somme," wrote a man of the
10th Bavarians, "and my regiment had fifteen hundred casualties."

A detailed picture of the German losses under our bombardment was given
in the