Our gun-fire, continued to-day as yesterday, leaves nothing alive or whole when it is concentrated on a place like this, deliberate in smashing it. Here it had flung up machine-gun emplacements and made rubbish-heaps of their casemates and guns. It had broken hundreds of rifles into matchwood, and flung up the kit of men from deep dug-outs, littering earth with their pouches and helmets and bits of clothing. Where I stood was only one patch of ground on a wide battlefield. It is all like that, though elsewhere the dead are not so thickly clustered. For miles it is all pitted with ten-feet craters intermingling and leaving not a yard of earth untouched. It is one great obscenity, killing for all time the legend of war's glory and romance. Over it to-day went a brave man on his mission. He was not a soldier, though he had a steel hat on his head and a khaki uniform. He was a padre who, with a fellow-officer and a few men, is following up the fighting men, burying those who fall, our own and the enemy's. He collects their identity discs and marks their graves. For weeks he has done this, and, though he is sickened, he goes on with a grim zeal, searching out the new dead, directing the digging of new graves, covering up Germans who lie so thick. He waved his hand to me as he went up to Loupart Wood, and I saluted him as a man of fine enthusiasm and good courage in the abomination of desolation which is our battle-ground.
The secret of the German retreat is here on this ground. To save themselves from another such shambles they are falling back to new lines, where they hope to be safer from our massed artillery. But as I saw to-day our gun-fire is following them closely and forcing them back at a harder pace, and killing them as they go. The horror of war is still close at their heels, and will never end till the war ends, though that may be long, O Lord! from now.
To-day quite early in the morning our Australian troops entered Bapaume. Achiet-le-Petit and Biefvillers also fell into our hands and the enemy is in retreat across the plains below the Bapaume Ridge.
I had the honour of going into Bapaume myself this morning, and the luck to come out again, and now, sitting down to tell the history of this day--one of the great days in this war--I feel something of the old thrill that came to all of us when the enemy fell back from the Marne and retreated to the Aisne.