less decisive. All through the night, and for several days thereafter, the Germans strove, by furious shelling and desperate counter-attacks, to regain the stronghold from which they had been so precipitately expelled. But our troops proved no less dogged in holding on than they had been dashing in attack, and all the enemy's efforts to retrieve his loss resulted only in further loss of ground and further punishment.

An added interest attaches to the action against Courcelette from the fact that in this engagement appeared for the first time those amazing engines of war known as the "Tanks." The cold official designation of these monsters is simply "Heavy Machine-Gun Battery." But Tommy Atkins, with his fine sense of the fitness of things and his gift for apt nomenclature, could not possibly leave this most daringly original offspring of our military inventiveness to labour under so commonplace a designation. He took this uncouth but invincible ally to his heart at once, and in humorous appreciation christened it a "Tank." And a Tank the amazing creation will remain, except for the purpose of some formal official documents. How effectively the Tanks played their novel rôle in the fight for Courcelette will appear in succeeding chapters in course of the detailed account of the individual units involved. Suffice it to say here that the high opinion formed on this, their first appearance, as to the fighting value of this new engine of attack has been more than justified by its later performances, which have confounded the jeers of the pessimist and the sceptic.

CHAPTER IV

THE SUGAR FACTORY AND COURCELETTE

When the Canadians came up to join the struggle on the Somme, they arrived under happy auspices. There was a sense of victory in the air. This is not less true literally than as a figure of speech; for on every hand the clear sky of early autumn in Picardy was dotted by our stationary observation balloons, and threaded by our darting 'planes, which scouted confidently far over the enemy lines or methodically registered for the massed ranks of our guns. Just at this period the supremacy of our Air Service was hardly ever disputed. The German 'planes rarely explored beyond our lines, and the German "sausages" seldom ventured aloft, having learned that such a venture was equivalent to speedy suicide. Moreover, here on the Somme Front our Battalions realised at once that, upon whatsoever hard undertaking they might be launched, they would have the support of an overmastering weight of artillery. Shell-fire, however murderous, loses half its effect upon the men's spirit when they feel that what they are enduring is mild compared to the avalanche of destruction which their own batteries, close behind them, are at the same moment letting loose upon the enemy. Altogether it was a tonic change for our Battalions, after their long gruelling in "the Salient," where at times they had felt themselves in much the position of the toad under the harrow, ground down into the Flanders mire by bombardments from three sides at once, and ceaselessly overlooked by an adversary holding superior positions. Here at last they marched up into the fight over ground wrenched from the enemy in spite of his most deliberate and desperate efforts to hold on to it. Here they felt that they would have a chance to "get a bit of their own back"—and, as the event will show, they got it, full measure and running over.

The terrain over which the attack was to be made is a gently undulating expanse of farm lands stripped naked by the incessant storm of shell-fire and closely pitted with shell-holes and craters. Of grass or herbage not a blade remained, of trees but here and there a bald and riven stump. Dividing this unspeakable waste runs the straight highway from Albert to Bapaume, thick strung with ruined, or rather obliterated, villages. Of these the most advanced in our possession was Pozières, with the great road running directly through it. A mile and a half further on the road runs midway between the twin villages of Courcelette (on the left) and Martinpuich (on the right), which lie about three-quarters of a mile apart. A little nearer our line, and flush with the left of the road—just about a mile from the eastern limit of Pozières—stood a mass of partly demolished brick buildings which had been a great sugar factory, and now, heavily entrenched and fortified by all the arts of the German engineers, constituted the most formidable outpost of Courcelette as well as an important flank defence to the position of Martinpuich. From the western extremity of Martinpuich a strong trench known as Candy Trench ran north-west to the Bapaume Road, skirted the west side of the Sugar Factory, continued in the same direction for a couple of hundred yards past that stronghold, and joined, at right angles, another deeply entrenched and strongly held line called Sugar Trench, which ran south-west for a distance of about twelve hundred yards and ended at McDonnell Road, a second-class thoroughfare almost parallel to the Bapaume highway. It was these two great trenches, each nearly three-quarters of a mile in length, forming two sides of a triangle with the Sugar Factory Fort in the apex, which constituted the grand obstacle to any advance on Courcelette itself. It was an obstacle of the first order, lavishly supported by bombing and machine-gun posts, its flanks fully guarded by trench-works outside of Martinpuich and along McDonnell Road. Such and so formidable was the objective which the 2nd Division set itself out to gain on that memorable morning of the 15th.

The troops detailed for the attack were the 4th and 6th Brigades, the 5th being held in reserve. The position from which the attack was ordered to start was a line of trench covering the front of Pozières, and something under half a mile in advance of the edge of the village. This line, roughly speaking about a mile in extent, ran south-west and north-west across the Bapaume Road, which divided it at right angles into two almost equal sectors, the major sector being that to the north or left of the road. The extreme left of the line rested on McDonnell Road, and joined up at that point with the 3rd Canadian Division. The right connected with the 15th British Division, which lay facing Martinpuich and kept the enemy force there fully occupied. The sector to the right of the Bapaume Road was in the hands of the 4th Brigade, under Brigadier-General R. Rennie, M.V.O., D.S.O., while the left sector was allotted to the 6th, under Brigadier-General H. D. B. Ketchen, C.M.G. The attacking line of the 4th Brigade was made up as follows:—On the right the 18th Battalion (Western Ontario), commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Milligan; centre, the 20th Battalion (Northern and Central Ontario), commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel C. H. Rogers; and on the left the 21st Battalion (Eastern Ontario), under Lieutenant-Colonel Elmer Jones. In Brigade Reserve was the 24th Battalion (Victoria Rifles of Canada), under Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Gunn. The attacking line of the 6th Brigade consisted of the 27th Battalion (City of Winnipeg), commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel P. J. Daly, D.S.O.; the 28th (North-West), commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. Embury, C.M.G.; and the 31st (Alberta), under Lieutenant-Colonel A. H. Bell, with the 29th (Vancouver), familiarly known as Tobin's Tigers, under Lieutenant-Colonel J. S. Tait, in Brigade Reserve. The field guns covering the attack consisted of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Canadian Divisional Artillery and four Brigades of the 18th Divisional Artillery, under Brigadier-General Metcalfe, D.S.O., on the right, and on the left three Brigades of the 1st Canadian Divisional Artillery and one Brigade of the Lahore Artillery, under the command of Brigadier-General Thacker. The barrage work of both these groups throughout the attack was of a closeness and accuracy which left nothing to be desired. It covered both the advance and the consolidation so effectually that our