This morning our troops made a general advance beyond the line of our recent attacks and gained about 1500 yards of ground on a wide front, which includes the village of Langemarck, and goes southward in the region of Glencorse Copse and Polygon Wood. From north to south the divisions engaged were the 29th, 20th, 11th, 48th, 36th (Ulster), 16th (Irish), 8th, and 56th.
On the left of our troops the French went forward also, and struck out into the swampy neck of ground which they call the Peninsula or Presqu'ile, surrounded on three sides by deep floods. On the right of our attack the fighting has been most violent, and the enemy has made strong and repeated counter-attacks over all the high ground which drops down to Glencorse Wood from the Nuns' Wood to the Hanebeek. His losses have been high, for although the weather is still stormy, making the ground bad for our men, there is light for our flying men and artillery observers, and at various parts of the Front his assembly of troops has been signalled quickly, so that our guns have smashed up his formations and caused great slaughter.
The Germans used to call the battles of the Somme the "blood-bath." Their diaries and their letters revealed the horror they had of the shambles into which they were driven. In the early days of this year they made a strategic retreat, under the guidance of Hindenburg, with the one object of escaping from our intense artillery-fire, but their methods of defence have been entirely changed by holding the front lines lightly by weak troops and scattered machine-gun emplacements, and concentrating their best troops behind for counter-attacks, in order to save man-power and lessen the tide of casualties. It is a sound system of defence, but it is the policy of an army fighting a retreat and giving up ground at the highest possible cost, never getting back by counter-attack to quite the same line over which the enemy had flowed. As a life-saving policy, however, the success has not been great, for it is certain that the German troops are suffering hideously from our shell-fire, and their counter-attacks have been costly in blood.
I suppose these words of mine convey nothing to people who read them. How could they when for three years we have been talking in superlatives without exaggerating the facts, but without understanding them, as minds are numbed by colossal figures? But out here, seeing the flame of shell-fire night after night stretching away round a great horizon, and hearing from near and from afar the ceaseless hammer-strokes of great guns, and watching the starlit sky, as I watched it last night from quiet cornfields, all red and restless with winking lights leaping up in tongues and spreading lengthwise in a sullen glare, one does realize a little the monstrous scale of all this and the destruction that is being done among the masses of men in the dark and in the hiding-places of the woods and trenches.