I went up in the night to see the bombardment and the
beginning of the battle and the swirl of its backwash, and I remember
now the darkness of villages behind the lines through which our cars
crawled, until we reached the edge of the battlefields and saw the sky
rent by incessant flames of gun-fire, while red tongues of flames
leaped up from burning villages. Longueval was on fire, and the two
Bazentins, and another belt of land in France, so beautiful to see,
even as I had seen it first between the sand-bags of our parapets, was
being delivered to the charcoal-burners.
I have described that night scene elsewhere, in all its deviltry, but
one picture which I passed on the way to the battlefield could not
then be told. Yet it was significant of the mentality of our High
Command, as was afterward pointed out derisively by Sixte von Arnim.
It proved the strange unreasoning optimism which still lingered in the
breasts of old-fashioned generals in spite of what had happened on the
left on the first day of July, and their study of trench maps, and
their knowledge of German machine-guns.
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