"All of their objectives!"
"Ah!" He drew a deep breath and rubbed his hands together softly. "And prisoners?"
"A great many."
"Ah! And guns?"
"Yes."
Thus he ran up the scale of happiness. I left him on the steps of the church with a proud, glad, abstracted look.
Beyond the town peaceful fields stretched away to the battle area, where figures packed together inside the new prisoners' inclosures made a green blot. Litters were thick in the streets of the casualty clearing stations which had been empty yesterday. There were no idle ambulances now. They had passengers in green as well as in khaki. The first hospital trains were pulling out from the rail-head across from a clearing station. Thus promptly, as foreseen, the processes of battle had worked themselves out.
From "light" cases and from "bad" cases, from officers and men, you had the account of an individual's supreme experience, infinitesimal compared to the whole but when taken together making up the whole. The wounded in the Thiepval-Gommecourt sector spoke of having "crawled" back across No Man's Land. South of Thiepval they had "walked" back. This, too, told the story of the difference between repulse and victory.
As the fight went for each man in the fray, so the battle went to his conception. The spectator going here and there could hear accounts at one headquarters of battalions that were beyond the first-line trenches and at another of battalions whose survivors were back in their own trenches. He could hear one wounded man say: "It was too stiff, sir. There was no getting through their curtains of fire against their machine guns, sir;" and another: "We went into their first line without a break and right on, gathering in Boches on the way."
Victory is sweet. It writes itself. Perhaps because failure is harder to write, though in this case it is equally glorious, we shall have this first. To make the picture of that day clearer, imagine a movement of the whole arm, with the shoulder at Gommecourt and the fist swinging in at Montauban, crushing its way against those fortifications. It broke through for a distance of more than from the elbow to the fingers' ends twenty miles southward from Thiepval—a name to bear in mind. Men crossing the open under protecting waves of shell fire had proved that men in dugouts with machine guns were not invincible.