out for a long time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our inner
battle zone. Through the gaps they made they came in masses at a great
pace with immense machine--gun strength and light artillery. On the
Third Army front where penetrations were made, notably near Bullecourt
between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole of our army machine was
upset for a time like a watch with a broken mainspring and loose wheels.
Staffs lost touch with fighting units. Communications were broken down.
Orders were given but not received. After enormous losses of men and
guns, our heavy artillery was choking the roads of escape, while our
rear-guards fought for time rather than for ground. The crossings of the
Somme were lost too easily. In the confusion and tumult of those days
some of our men, being human, were demoralized and panic-stricken, and
gave ground which might have been longer held. But on the whole, and in
the mass, there was no panic, and a most grim valor of men who fought
for days and nights without sleep; fought when they were almost
surrounded or quite surrounded, and until few of them remained to hold
any kind of line. Fortunately the Germans were unable to drag their
heavy guns over the desert they had made a year before in their own
retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened and they halted,
in exhaustion.

I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and
Hum; then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at
last on a dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic
fighting-ground, where once again after many battles the enemy was in
Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to
the right through Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban. That
meant the loss of all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck a
chill in one's heart. But what I marveled at always was the absence of
panic, the fatalistic acceptance of the turn of fortune's wheel by many
officers and men, and the refusal of corps and divisional staffs to give
way to despair in those days of tragedy and crisis.

The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see. The
menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to Bailleul
and captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to
relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men. All through this
country between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck, Metern, and
Bailleul, thou