Most men believed, even then, that it would
end quickly, and each side had faith in some miracle that might
happen. In 1916-17 the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme
after battles which had cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered
the soul of the world by the immense martyrdom of boys--British,
French, and German--on the western front. But the German retreat from
the Somme to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite to
our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack and counter-
attack, and from the intensity of gun-fire. There was at best the
mirage of something like victory on our side, a faint flickering up of
the old faith that the Germans had weakened and were nearly spent.
But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No
mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into
seeing a vision of the war's end.
The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground
we had gained--he new horror of that new salient--had sapped into the
confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of
German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals.
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