Australian Artillery—going into action at Cressaire Wood.
Battle of August 8th, 1918—German prisoners being brought out of the battle under the fire of their own artillery.
During the winter of 1917-1918 the British Fifth Army and the Germans had faced each other in this region for many months. On our side, also, a system of field defences had been developed. They fell far short, indeed, of the completeness and ingenuity of the German works, because the latter had been constructed at leisure, long before, while ours had been built under the very fire of the German guns.
For months the opposing Artilleries had pounded the country to pieces, effaced every sign of civilization, and churned up the ground in all directions over a belt some three miles wide. Heaps of broken bricks marked the sites of once prosperous villages. Broken telegraph poles, charred tree trunks, twisted rails, a chaos of mangled machinery, were the only remains of what had once been gardens, orchards, railways and factories. The whole territory presented the aspect of a rolling, tumbled desert from which life itself had been banished.
This was the region whose western verge the vanguard of the Australian advance approached on September 11th, on a frontage of about 8,000 yards, the northern extremity directed on Bellicourt, the southern on Bellenglise. That is to say, if our further advance had but continued unimpeded in the same due easterly direction, it would have brought us square upon the open excavation of the canal, and just clear and to the south of the Bellicourt—Le Catelet tunnel. Some significance attached to this circumstance, as will later appear.
Now, some little time before, an event of peculiar interest had occurred. This was the capture, on another front, of a very ordinary-looking transport vehicle loaded high with miscellaneous baggage. Little escaped the inquisitive eyes of the British Intelligence Service, which speedily discovered that among this baggage there safely reposed a large collection of maps and documents. On examination these proved to be nothing less than the complete Defence Scheme of the whole "Siegfried" system, in that very sector which now lay before the Australian Corps.
These papers were carefully overhauled and arranged. There were dozens of accurately drawn detailed maps, and minute descriptions of every tactical feature of the defences. The position of every gun emplacement was given; every searchlight, machine-gun pit, observation post, telephone exchange, command station and mortar emplacement was clearly marked; the topographical and tactical features of the ground were discussed in minute detail, and plans for the action of every individual unit of the garrisons were fully displayed.