Of the deadly work beneath that pall of smoke, as steel met steel and the new soldiers of Britain fleshed their bayonets for the first time, and fell by the thousand under the murderous fire of machine-guns, history will tell the tale long after the survivors have ceased to recount the deeds of the day to their grandchildren wherever the English tongue is spoken. Each side gives credit to the other for the utmost bravery and devotion during the battle. The new English regiments fought like veterans, and fully maintained the traditions of the British army for dogged bravery, while the Germans fought with desperate tenacity, valor and resourcefulness, this last quality being displayed in the devices which had been invented and were used to prevent or delay the Allied advance. It was indeed wonderful how well the Germans had protected their machine-guns from the devastating effects of the preliminary bombardment, which tore trenches to pieces and utterly demolished barbed-wire entanglements, but failed in many cases to destroy the deep bomb-proofs in which the Teuton machine-guns were protected and concealed.
CONTINUATION OF THE GREAT BATTLE
On July 2 and 3, the battle of the Somme continued without cessation of infantry fighting, while the big guns thundered on both sides. The British offensive took Fricourt on the 2nd, after a tremendous bombardment, and occupied several villages, while the French advanced to within three miles of Peronne. Ten thousand more prisoners fell into the hands of the Allies on these two days. On the 4th, German resistance temporarily halted the British, but the French offensive took German second-line positions south of the Somme on a six-mile front. Violent counter-attacks by the Germans on July 6 failed to wrest from the French the ground won by them during the previous five days, and the Allied troops resumed their advance, taking the German second-line trenches all along the front in the face of a heavy fire. Next day Contalmaison was won by the British, but recaptured by the Prussian Guard, who held the town for three days, when they were again driven out.
A desperate struggle for the possession of the Mametz woods marked the fighting from the 10th to the 12th, the British and the Germans alternating in its possession. Victory at this point finally lay with the British, who on July 12 gained possession of the whole locality, together with the Trones wood, which had also been the scene of a bloody straggle. By this time some 30,000 German prisoners had been taken by the Allies during the offensive, while the losses in killed and wounded on both sides, in the absence of official reports, could only be estimated in appalling numbers.
TRAGIC TALE OF A GERMAN PRISONER
A typical description of some of the horrors of the battle, as it surged around Contalmaison, was given by a German prisoner on July 12 to the war correspondent of the London Chronicle. He spoke English, having been employed in London for some years prior to the war. With his regiment, the 122nd Bavarians, he went into Contalmaison five days before his capture. Soon the rations they took with them were exhausted, and owing to the ceaseless gunfire they were unable to get fresh supplies. They suffered agonies of thirst and the numbers of their dead and wounded increased day after day.
"There was a hole in the ground," said the German prisoner, whose head was bound with a bloody bandage and who was still dazed and troubled when the correspondent talked with him. "It was a dark hole which held twenty men, all lying in a heap together, and that was the only dugout for my company, so there was not room for more than a few. It was necessary to take turns in this shelter while outside the English shells were coming and bursting everywhere. Two or three men were dragged out to make room for two or three others, then those who went outside were killed or wounded.
"There was only one doctor, an unter officer,"—he pointed to a man who lay asleep on the ground face downward—"and he bandaged some of us till he had no more bandages; then last night we knew the end was coming. Your guns began to fire altogether, the dreadful trommelfeuer, as we call it, and the shells burst and smashed up the earth about us. "We stayed down in the hole, waiting for the end. Then we heard your soldiers shouting. Presently two of them came down into our hole. They were two boys and had their pockets full of bombs; they had bombs in their hands also, and they seemed to wonder whether they should kill us, but we were all wounded—nearly all—and we cried 'Kamerade!' and now we are prisoners."
Other prisoners said in effect that the fire was terrible in Contalmaison and at least half their men holding it were killed or wounded, so that when the British entered they walked over the bodies of the dead. The men who escaped were in a pitiful condition. "They lay on the ground utterly exhausted, most of them, and, what was strange, with their faces to the earth. Perhaps it was to blot out the vision of the things they had seen."
Meanwhile, despite the threatening character of the Allied offensive on the Somme, German assaults on the Verdun front continued unabated during July, and there was little evidence of the withdrawal of German troops from that point to reinforce the army opposed to the British. But except at Verdun, Germany was at bay everywhere, and the situation was recognized in the Fatherland as serious. Never before had the Allies been able to drive at Germany from all sides at once. Only at Verdun the German Crown Prince, long halted at that point, was keeping up a slow but strong offensive pressure.