In the distance was the main German second trench line on the crest of Longueval and High Wood Ridge, which the British were later to win after a struggle which left nothing of woods or villages or ridges except shell-craters. Naturally, the Germans had not restricted their original defenses to the ridge itself, any more than the French had theirs to the hills immediately in front of Verdun. They had placed their original first-line trenches along the series of advantageous positions on the slope and turned every bit of woods and every eminence into a strong point on the way back to the second line, whose barbed-wire entanglements rusted by long exposure were distinct under the glasses. A German officer stood on the parapet looking out in our direction, probably trying to locate the British infantry advance which was hugging a fold in the ground and resting there for the time being. I imagined how beaver-like were the Germans in the second line strengthening their defenses. I scanned all the slopes facing us in the hope of seeing a German battery. There must be one under those balls of black smoke from high explosives from British guns and another a half mile away under the same kind of shower.
"They withdrew most of their guns behind the ridge overnight," said an officer, "in order to avoid capture in case we made another rush."
On the other side of this natural wall they would be safe from any except aerial observation, and the advanced British batteries, though all in the open, were in folds in the ground, or behind bluffs, or just below the skyline of a rise where they had found their assigned position by the map. How much a few feet of depression in a field, a slightly sunken road, the grade of a gentle slope, which hid man or gun from view counted for I did not realize that day as I was to realize in the fierce fight for position which was to come in succeeding weeks.
It was easy to understand why the Germans had made a strong point in the first line where I was standing, for it was a position which, in relation to both the British and the German trenches, would instantly appeal to the tactical eye. Here they had emplaced machine guns manned by chosen desperate men which had given the British charge its worst experience over a mile front. I could see all the movement over a broad area to the rear which, however, the rise under my feet hid from the ridge where the German officer stood. The advantage which the Germans had after their retreat from the Marne was brought home afresh once you were on conquered ground. A mile more or less of depth had no sentimental interest to them, for they were on foreign soil. They had chosen their positions by armies, by corps, by battalions, by hundreds of miles and tens of miles and tens of yards with the view to a command of observation and ground. This was a simple application of the formula as old as man; but it was their numbers and preparedness that permitted its application and wherever the Allies were to undertake the offensive they must face this military fact, which made the test of their skill against frontal positions all the stiffer and added tribute to success.
The scene in front reminded one of a great carpet which did not lie flat on the floor but was in undulations, with the whole on an incline toward Longueval and High Wood Ridge. The Ridge I shall call it after this, for so it was in capital letters to millions of French, British and German soldiers in the summer of 1916. And this carpet was peopled with men in a game of hide and seek with death among its folds.
No vehicle, no horse was anywhere visible. Yet it was a poignantly live world where the old trench lines had been a dead world—a world alive in the dots of men strung along the crest, in others digging new trenches, in messengers and officers on the move, in clumps of reserves behind a hillock or in a valley. Though bursting shrapnel jackets whipped out the same kind of puffs as always from a flashing center which spread into nimbus radiant in the sunlight and the high explosives sent up the same spouts of black smoke as if a stick of dynamite had burst in a coal box, the shell fire seemed different; it had a quality of action and adventure in comparison with the monotonous exhibition which we had watched in stalemate warfare. Death now had some element of glory and sport. It was less like set fate in a stationary shambles.
Directly ahead was a bare sweep of field of waste wild grass between the German communication trenches where wheat had grown before the war, and the British firing-line seemed like heads fastened to a greenish blanket. Holding the ground that they had gained, they were waiting on something to happen elsewhere. Others must advance before they could go farther.
The battle was not general; it raged at certain points where the Germans had anchored themselves after some recovery from the staggering blow of the first day. Beyond Fricourt the British artillery was making a crushing concentration on a clump of woods. This seemed to be the hottest place of all. I would watch it. Nothing except the blanket of shell-smoke hanging over the trees was visible for a time, unless you counted figures some distance away moving about in a sort of detached pantomime.
Then a line of British infantry seemed to rise out of the pile of the carpet and I could see them moving with a drill-ground steadiness toward the edge of the woods, only to be lost to the eye in a fold of the carpet or in a changed background. There had been something workmanlike and bold about their rigid, matter-of-fact progress, reflective of man-power in battle as seen very distinctly for a space in that field of baffling and shimmering haze. I thought that I had glimpses of some of them just before they entered the woods and that they were mixing with figures coming out of the woods. At any rate, what was undoubtedly a half company of German prisoners were soon coming down the slope in a body, only to disappear as if they, too, were playing their part in the hide and seek of that irregular landscape with its variation from white chalk to dark green foliage.
Khaki figures stood out against the chalk and melted into the fields or the undergrowth, or came up to the skyline only to be swallowed into the earth probably by the German trench which they were entering. I wondered if one group had been killed, or knocked over, or had merely taken cover in a shell-crater when a German "krump" seemed to burst right among them, though at a distance of even a few hundred yards nothing is so deceiving as the location of a shell-burst in relation to objects in line with it. The black cloud drew a curtain over them. When it lifted they were not on the stage. This was all that one could tell.