The British had by now taken 11,000 prisoners, to a somewhat larger number taken by the French, 17 heavy guns, 37 field-guns, 30 trench howitzers, and 66 machine-guns.  On Saturday night, July 22-23, the greater part of Pozieres, on the high ground toward Bapaume, was taken.  “Shortly after midnight,” wrote the official correspondent at Headquarters with the Australian Imperial Forces in France, “on the 23rd, by a splendid night attack, the Australians took the greater portion of Pozieres.”  The previous bombardment had been magnificent.  “I had never before seen such a spectacle.  A large sector of the horizon was lit up not by single flashes, but by a continuous band of quivering light.”  And under the protection of the guns, the Anzacs swept forward, passing over trenches, so entirely obliterated by shell-fire that they were often not recognised as trenches at all, till they were in the heart of the village.  Then for two days they fought from house to house, and trench to trench; till on July 27th came the news—­“The whole of the village of Pozieres is now in our hands.”  And the Times correspondent writes “our establishment at Pozieres will probably be regarded historically as closing the second phase of the battle of the Somme.”

Since then (I write on August 16) three weeks have passed.  The German Third Line has been entered at the Bois de Foureaux, the whole of Delville Wood has been carried; and in the combined advance of July 30th, the French swept on to Maurepas on the north of the Somme, and are closely threatening both Combles and Peronne, while we are attacking Thiepval on the left of our line and Guillemont on the right, and pushing forward, north of Pozieres, toward Bapaume.  The whole of the great advance has been a thrust up-hill from the valley floors of the Ancre and the Somme toward a low ridge running roughly east and west and commanding an important stretch of country and vital communications beyond.  “It has in just four weeks of effort,” writes Mr. Belloc—­“accounted for some thirty thousand unwounded or slightly wounded prisoners; for much more than 100 guns; for a belt of territory over five miles in its extreme breadth, and—­what is much more important than any of these numerical and local calculations—­it has proved itself capable of continuous effort against all the concentration which the enemy has been able to bring against it.”

But it has done yet more than this.  It has welded the French and English Alliance—­the wills and minds of the two nations—­more closely than ever before; and it has tested the British war-machine—­the new Armies and the new arms—­as they have never yet been tested in this war.  The result has set the heart of England aflame; even while we ponder those long, long casualty lists which represent the bitter price that British fathers and mothers, British wives and daughters have paid, and must still pay, for the only victory which will set up once again