Yet the last six months of 1916 had advanced our front no more than some eight miles--along the Albert-Bapaume road. At no point were we more than ten miles from our beginnings. All that showed on the map was that the enemy’s line to the north had been pinched into a salient which, starting from just east of Arras, followed the line of the old German front built up two years before, through Monchy-au-Bois, Gomiecourt and Serre to the high white grounds above Beaumont-Hamel. Thence it turned east across the Ancre, seven or eight kilometres north of Arras, skirted Grandcourt, crossed the arrow-straight Albert-Bapaume road by the dreary Butte de Warlencourt, ran north-east of Gueudecourt, and on the rim of the rise above Le Transloy, till it crossed the Péronne-Bapaume road just north of Sailly-Saillisel. Here it swung south-east from Rancourt and Bouchavesnes down the long slopes to the Valley of the Somme, and its marshes west of Péronne. Thence, south-westerly by Berny-en-Santerre, Ablaincourt to the outskirts of Chaulnes, ending at Le Quesnoy-en-Santerre, where the French took on. The twenty-five mile stretch from Le Transloy to Le Quesnoy was the new section that had been handed over to the British care, piece by piece, at the end of the year.
To meet this pinch and all that they could see that it meant, the Germans had constructed, while they and the weather held us, elaborate second and third lines of defence behind their heavily fortified front. The first barrier--a double line of trenches, heavily wired, ran behind Sailly-Saillisel, past Le Transloy to the Albert-Bapaume road, Grévillers and Loupart woods, and _via_ Achiet-le-Petit to Bucquoy.
Parallel to this, at a distance ranging from one to two miles, was a new line through Rocquigny, Bapaume, and Ablainzevelle, almost equally strong and elaborate. Behind it, as every one understood, was a thing called the Hindenburg Line, known to the Germans as “Siegfried”--a forty-mile marvel of considered defences with branches and spurs and switches, one end of which lay on St. Quentin and the other outside Arras. This could be dealt with later, but, meantime, the enemy in the Arras-Le Transloy salient were uneasy. The attacks delivered on selected positions; the little inter-related operations that stole a few hundred yards of trench or half a village at a leap, or carried a gun-group to a position whence our batteries could peer out and punish; above all, the cold knowledge that sooner or later our unimaginative, unmilitary infantry would shamble after the guns, made them think well of lines in their rear to which they could retire at leisure. Verdun had not fallen; very many of their men lay dead outside its obliterated forts, and so very many living were needed to make good the daily drain of the Somme that they had none too many to spare for Austrian or Turkish needs. Their one energetic ally was the weather, which, with almost comic regularity, gave them time after each reverse to draw breath, position more guns, reorganise reliefs, and explain to their doubting public in Germany the excellence and the method of their army’s plans for the future. The battle of the Ancre, for instance, was followed by an absolute deadlock of six weeks, when our armies--one cannot assault and dig out battalions at the same time--dropped everything to fight the mud, while our front-line wallowed in bottomless trenches where subalterns took from three to six hours to visit their posts on a front of one quarter of a mile.