our men on their
first going in.

In the fire trench they saw little more than the parapet. If work were
being done in the No Man's Land, they still saw little save by these
lights that floated and fell from the enemy and from ourselves. They
could see only an array of stakes tangled with wire, and something
distant and dark which might be similar stakes, or bushes, or men, in
front of what could only be the enemy line. When the night passed, and
those working outside the trench had to take shelter, they could see
nothing, even at a loophole or periscope, but the greenish strip of
ground, pitted with shell-holes and fenced with wire, running up to
the enemy line. There was little else for them to see, looking to the
front, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale.

The soldiers who held this old front line of ours saw this grass and
wire day after day, perhaps, for many months. It was the limit of
their world, the horizon of their landscape, the boundary. What
interest there was in their life was the speculation, what lay beyond
that wire, and what the enemy was doing there. They seldom saw an
enemy. They heard his songs and they were stricken by his missiles,
but seldom saw more than, perhaps, a swiftly moving cap at a gap in
the broken parapet, or a grey figure flitting from the light of a
starshell. Aeroplanes brought back photographs of those unseen lines.
Sometimes, in raids in the night, our men visited them and brought
back prisoners; but they remained mysteries and unknown.

In the early morning of the 1st of July, 1916, our men looked at them
as they showed among the bursts of our shells. Those familiar heaps,
the lines, were then in a smoke of dust full of flying clods and
shards and gleams of fire. Our men felt that now, in a few minutes,
they would see the enemy and know what lay beyond those parapets and
probe the heart of that mystery. So, for the last half-hour, they
watched and held themselves ready, while the screaming of the shells
grew wilder and the roar of the bursts quickened into a drumming. Then
as the time drew near, they looked a last look at that unknown
country, now almost blotted in the fog of War, and saw the flash of
our shells, breaking a little further off as the gunners "lifted," and
knew that the moment had come. Then for one wild confused moment they
knew that they were running towards that unknown land, which they
could still see in the dust ahead. For a moment, they saw the par