"
They were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through the streets of
French and Belgian towns to be entrained for the Somme front, for they
had forebodings of the fate before them. Yet none of their forebodings
were equal in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into which
they were flung.
The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, was a way of
terror, ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds
searching obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of
human agony could surpass these scenes along the way to the German
lines round Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, and Lesboeufs.
Many times, long before a German battalion had arrived near the
trenches, it was but a collection of nerve--broken men bemoaning
losses already suffered far behind the lines and filled with hideous
apprehension. For British long-range guns were hurling high explosives
into distant villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to rail-
heads and ammunition-dumps, while British airmen were on bombing
flights over railway stations and rest-billets and highroads down
which the German troops came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the
valley between Irles and Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, and
many other places on the lines of route.
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