On Tuesday morning the shelling of the day before rose to a crescendo, and then suddenly slackened.  The German was attacking.  It was only a few of the infantry who even saw him.  The attack came in lines at fairly wide intervals up the reverse slope of the hill behind Pozieres windmill.  Before it reached the crest it came under the sudden barrage of our own guns’ shrapnel.  The German lines swerved away up the hill.  The excited infantry on the extreme right could see Germans crawling over, as quickly as they might, from one shell crater to another, grey backs hopping from hole to hole.  They blazed away hard; but most of our infantry never got the chance it was thirsting for.  The artillery beat back that attack before it was over the crest, and the Germans broke and ran.  Again the enemy’s artillery was turned on.  Pozieres was pounded more furiously than before, until by four in the afternoon it seemed to onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such an ordeal.  The place could be picked out for miles by pillars of red and black dust towering above it like a Broken Hill dust-storm.  Then Germans were reported coming on again, as in the morning.  Again our artillery descended upon them like a hailstorm, and nothing came of the attack.

During all this time, in spite of the shelling, the troops were slowly working forwards through Pozieres; not backwards.  Every day saw fresh ground gained.  A great part of the men who were working through it had no more than two or three hours’ sleep since Saturday—­some of them none at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.

The only relief to this one-sided struggle against machinery was the hand-to-hand fighting that occurred in the two trenches before-mentioned—­the second-line German trench behind Pozieres and the similar trench in front of it.  The story of it will be told some day—­it would almost deserve a book to itself.

CHAPTER XVI

AN ABYSM OF DESOLATION

France, August 1st.

When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation could reach.  A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under which men had burrowed like rats, but with method, so as to make a city underneath the shattered foundations of the village.  And then their rat city had been crushed in from above; and through the splintered timbered entrances you peered into a dark interior of dishevelled blankets and scattered clothing.  It was only too evident that there had been no time as yet, in the hustle of battle, to search these ghastly, noisome dug-outs for the Germans who had been bombed there.  The mine craters in the white chalk of La Boiselle are big enough to hide a large church.

But for sheer desolation it will not compare with Pozieres.  On the top of a gently rising hill, over which the Roman road ran as is the way with Roman roads, was a pretty village, with its church, its cemetery under the shady trees; its orchards and picturesque village houses.  When the lines crystallised in front of Albert it was some miles behind the German trenches.  Our guns put a few shells into it; but six weeks ago it was still a country village, somewhat wrecked but probably used for the headquarters of a German regiment.  Then came the British bombardment for a week before the battle of the Somme.