The British and French offensive was drawing in all
the German reserves and draining them of their life's blood.
"We entrained at Savigny," wrote a man of one of these regiments, "and
at once knew our destination. It was our old blood-bath--the Somme."
In many letters this phrase was used. The Somme was called the "Bath
of Blood" by the German troops who waded across its shell-craters and
in the ditches which were heaped with their dead. But what I have
described is only the beginning of the battle, and the bath was to be
filled deeper in the months that followed.
XXI
The name (that "blood-bath") and the news of battle could not be
hidden from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with
horror by the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve
regiments quartered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St.
Quentin, Cambrai, Lille, Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting
to go to the front, nor from the civil population of those towns, held
for two years by their enemy--these blond young men who lived in their
houses, marched down their streets, and made love to their women.
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