For this battle was no action of sure attack, of reserves moving forward punctual to clock-time, of orderly pursuit and retreat. In that vast crucible of fire which bulged northwards astride the river from French Dompierre to English Ovilliers, Infantry Divisions of twelve thousand men shrivelled as paper shrivels in flame; brigades melted to battalions; battalions to companies: between a moonrise and a sun-setting they were and they were not. But always as Infantry Divisions shrivelled, fresh Infantry Divisions flung themselves into the crucible; and always, behind the shrivelling melting infantry, stayed the guns—stayed till human sinews could serve them no longer. . . .
Vague echoes of those guns, hints of their flashes, were borne o’ nights to Peter Jameson as he lay sleepless among sleeping men; as he twisted over and over between the ruggled blankets on his creaking camp-bed; as he sweated away the darkness and shivered through the dawn-chill; to Peter with the spitting cough fouling his mouth and the pin-prick pain stabbing below his heart,—to Peter Jameson, one tiny glorious fool among the millions whose folly saved our world.
The “Somme Offensive” of 1916 is ancient history now: a thing of Staff maps and war-diaries, of barren paper and profitless arguments, flat as the faked film of it men once sold for profit in the market-place. The very ground over which it raged has been obliterated by the shells of vastier battles.
Yet the “Somme Offensive,” bloodiest experiment ever undertaken in the laboratory of war, marked the beginning of the ending—of War’s ending, as softies dream today. Compared to this holocaust, Loos was a skirmish.
Day after day, night after night, week after week, men flung themselves upon the Beast; drove him wave by wave across the barren swells of Picardy: till, at last, burning and ravaging, defiling the very beds in which he had slept, wreaking vengeance on the very trees whose fruit he had eaten, the Beast withdrew for a while—withdrew, and came on again, and was overthrown. . . . There died and were wounded in those drivings of the Beast more than two million English-speaking men.
The “Somme Offensive”! What remains of it today? Only memories, bitter memories that waken men o’ nights: so that they see once more the golden Virgin of Albert, poised miraculously on her red and riven tower; Carnoy shattered in its hollow, a giant-baby’s toy-village, dropped from careless hand and smashed in the falling; the ruins that were Mametz and the ruins that were Contalmaison and the ruins that were Fricourt and the ruins that were Pozières: see once more the crowded horselines blackening Happy Valley, the balloons strung like sausages across the sky, the thousand planes circling like hawks above them! So that they hear once more the staccato of machine-gun fire high in the air, the dull thump of the huge and hidden naval guns at Etinehem, the roar of squat nine-point-two’s on their wheel-less mountings, the roar of the railway-gun at Becordel, the thunder of eight-inch and six-inch Howitzers in Caterpillar Valley, the ear-splitting crash of Six-Inch Mark VII’s from the road by the Craters, the manifold clamour of the Archies at Montauban, the constant bark of the field-guns beyond: so that they walk once more, naked and alone, among the careless ghosts of men they knew, through that horror which was Trônes Wood. . . .