It was while the prisoner sat there that we heard about the raid.  They clearly considered it something of a failure.  They had to get through a ditch full of water to their necks, then some trip-wire, then a knee-deep entanglement, then a ditch full of rusty wire, then some “French” coils of barbed wire, then more wire knee-deep, with trip-wire after that.  Moreover, the enemy’s artillery fire was heavy.  They simply went on over the parapet into the enemy’s trench for a few minutes and killed with their bombs about a dozen Germans, and brought in as prisoners those who were left wounded.  Every man of their own who was wounded they carried carefully back through the tempest in No Man’s Land.  The Germans had spent at least as much artillery ammunition as we had, and in spite of all the noise they had done wonderfully little damage.  We put a dozen of them out of action till the end of the war—­a dozen that our men saw and know of; and they may have put out of action five of ours.

As we took a tired prisoner to the hospital through the grey light of morning, I thought I would give, for a change, an account of a “failure.”

[It was almost immediately after this that the Australians were brought down to the Somme battle.  From this time on they left the neighbourhood of green fields and farmhouses and plunged into the brown, ploughed-up nightmare battlefield where the rain of shells has practically never since ceased.  They came into the battle in its second stage, exactly three weeks after the British.]

CHAPTER XV

POZIERES

France, July 26th.

I have been watching the units of a certain famous Australian force come out of action.  They have fought such a fight that the famous division of British regular troops on their flank sent them a message to say that they were proud to fight by the side of them.

Conditions alter in a battle like this from day to day.  But at the time when the British attack upon the second German line in Longueval and Bazentin ended, the farther village of Pozieres was left as the hub of the battle for the time being.  This point is the summit of the hill on which the German second line ran.  And, probably for that reason, the new line which the Germans had dug across from their second line to their third line—­so as to have a line still barring our way when we had broken through their second line—­branched off near Pozieres to meet the third line near Flers.  The map of the situation at this stage of the battle will show better than a page of description why it was necessary that Pozieres should next be captured.