A SURPRISE PREPARED
“For weeks past the German airmen had grown strangely shy. On this Wednesday morning none were aloft to spy out the strange doings which as dawn broke might have been descried on the desolate roads behind the British lines.
“From ten o’clock of the preceding evening endless files of men marched silently down the roads leading towards the German positions through Laventie and Richebourg St. Vaast, poor shattered villages of the dead where months of incessant bombardment have driven away the last inhabitants and left roofless houses and rent roadways. . . .
“Two days before, a quiet room, where Nelson’s Prayer stands on the mantel-shelf, saw the ripening of the plans that sent these sturdy sons of Britain’s four kingdoms marching all through the night. Sir John French met the army corps commanders and unfolded to them his plans for the offensive of the British Army against the German line at Neuve Chapelle.
“The onslaught was to be a surprise. That was its essence. The Germans were to be battered with artillery, then rushed before they recovered their wits. We had thirty-six clear hours before us. Thus long, it was reckoned (with complete accuracy as afterwards appeared), must elapse before the Germans, whose line before us had been weakened, could rush up reinforcements. To ensure the enemy’s being pinned down right and left of the ‘great push,’ an attack was to be delivered north and south of the main thrust simultaneously with the assault on Neuve Chapelle.”
After describing the impatience of the British soldiers as they awaited the signal to open the attack, and the actual beginning of the engagement, the narrator continues:
“There Is Nothing to Report.”