Staffs lost touch with fighting units.
Communications were broken down. Orders were given but not received.
After enormous losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was choking
the roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time rather than
for ground. The crossings of the Somme were lost too easily. In the
confusion and tumult of those days some of our men, being human, were
demoralized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might have been
longer held. But on the whole, and in the mass, there was no panic,
and a most grim valor of men who fought for days and nights without
sleep; fought when they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded,
and until few of them remained to hold any kind of line. Fortunately
the Germans were unable to drag their heavy guns over the desert they
had made a year before in their own retreat, and at the end of a week
their pace slackened and they halted, in exhaustion.
I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and
Hum; then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at last
on a dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic
fighting-ground, where once again after many battles the enemy was in
Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to
the right through Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban.
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