Of late the scene-painter’s art—­technically known as camouflage—­has raised the concealment of batteries and their observation posts to the realm of the uncanny.  According to Major Wagstaffe, you can now disguise anybody as anything.  For instance, you can make up a battery of six-inch guns to look like a flock of sheep, and herd them into action browsing.  Or you can despatch a scouting party across No Man’s Land dressed up as pillar-boxes, so that the deluded Hun, instead of opening fire with a machine-gun, will merely post letters in them—­valuable letters, containing military secrets.  Lastly, and more important still, you can disguise yourself to look like nothing at all, and in these days of intensified artillery fire it is very seldom that nothing at all is hit.

The particular O Pip with which we are concerned at present, however, is a German post—­or was a fortnight ago, before the opening of the Battle of the Somme.

For nearly two years the British Armies on the Western Front have been playing for time.  They have been sticking their toes in and holding their ground, with numerically inferior forces and inadequate artillery support, against a nation in arms which has set out, with forty years of preparation at its back, to sweep the earth.  We have held them, and now der Tag has come for us.  The deal has passed into our hand at last.  A fortnight ago, ready for the first time to undertake the offensive on a grand and prolonged scale,—­Loos was a mere reconnaissance compared with this,—­the New British Army went over the parapet shoulder to shoulder with the most heroic Army in the world—­the Army of France—­and attacked over a sixteen-mile front in the Valley of the Somme.

It was a critical day for the Allies:  certainly it was a most critical day in the history of the British Army.  For on that day an answer had to be given to a very big question indeed.  Hitherto we had been fighting on the defensive—­unready, uphill, against odds.  It would have been no particular discredit to us had we failed to hold our line.  But we had held it, and more.  Now, at last, we were ready—­as ready as we were ever likely to be.  We had the men, the guns, and the munitions.  We were in a position to engage the enemy on equal, and more than equal, terms.  And the question that the British Empire had to answer in that day, the First of July 1916, was this:  “Are these new amateur armies of ours, raised, trained, and equipped in less than two years, with nothing in the way of military tradition to uphold them—­nothing but the steady courage of their race:  are they a match for, and more than a match for, that grim machine-made, iron-bound host that lies waiting for them along that line of Picardy hills?  Because if they are not, we cannot win this war.  We can only make a stalemate of it.”