At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left
their trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt,
Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward
from Fricourt, below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German
troops--Bavarians and Prussians--had been crouching in their dugouts,
listening to the ceaseless crashing of the British "drum-fire." In
places like Beaumont Hamel, the men down in the deep tunnels--some of
them large enough to hold a battalion and a half--were safe as long as
they stayed there. But to get in or out was death. Trenches
disappeared into a sea of shell-craters, and the men holding them--for
some men had to stay on duty there--were blown to fragments.
Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and
officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days
of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban. The living men kept
their courage, but below ground, under that tumult of bursting shells,
and wrote pitiful letters to their people at home describing the
horror of those hours.
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