barrage upon barrage. Meanwhile, without a pause, the troops advance across this hell. I can follow, with the naked eye, every movement of an active young officer, who is wearing a light yellow overcoat, and who is charging at the head of his company, with a cane under his left arm and a revolver in his right hand as calmly as if he were strolling along Regent Street or Piccadilly.

The human wave, breaking through the barrage, disappears suddenly in the earth. It is as if a chasm had opened to swallow all these men at a gulp. And now, listen! For the gunfire is punctuated with sharp detonations. It sounds like a shrill drumming, swelled by furious shouts and cries of agony. The Tommies have entered the enemy's lines. After a short period of bombing, they advance, yard by yard, with the bayonet. Round the blockhouses the machine-guns rattle. We listen anxiously to these thousand voices of the attack. Every man has vanished. The field of vision is empty. Only the variegated smokes of the different shells spread themselves slowly abroad. The uncertainty is unbearable. Half an hour later we learn from the telephone that the attack has succeeded. The brigade has done its work. We have just witnessed, on the north bank of the Ancre, the capture of an important trench, or rather redoubt, nearly 450 yards away from Beaumont—the Munich Trench.

2. PRISONERS.

Here again there has been a famous haul of prisoners. More than 300 unwounded soldiers have been compelled to surrender. In a short time the first of them cross in front of our observation post. They are haggard, covered with mud, and their eyes are the eyes of trapped beasts. Two of them, converted into impromptu stretcher-bearers, are carrying a wounded officer on a stretcher that is soaked in blood.

And now the battle increases everywhere in violence. We hear that on this side of Beaucourt some strong reserves, collected there by the Germans, have just been surrounded and taken prisoners. A whole brigade staff has fallen into the hands of the English. More than 5,000 prisoners have been counted already. It will take at least two days to count all that have been taken. A genuine victory!

The "tanks" have played an honourable part in the battle, and I have just seen two of them at work. My impressions may be summed up in these words: a huge amazement and satisfaction.

One of them, which has been christened The Devil's Delight, did marvels at Beaucourt. This deliberate leviathan, having placed itself boldly at the head of the advancing flood of men, took up its position at the entrance of the ruined village. At first the Germans fled. Then, one by one, they came back. With machine-guns, bombs, rifles and mortars they endeavoured to pierce its double shell. Nothing availed. Squatted on its tail, the terrific tank lorded it there like a king on his horse. It made no objection whatever to being approached. Some sappers tried to place bombs under it, to blow it sky high. Inside it the crew shammed dead. The Germans took heart. Ten, twenty, thirty men, armed with screw-jacks and mallets laboured to overthrow it. But what could even two battalions have accomplished against this patient mastodon, whose skin was steel and whose weight was 800 tons? A colonel, mad with rage, fired the eight barrels of his revolver at it, point-blank. If the tank could have laughed it must have burst with delight. Its sense of humour is a strictly warlike one.

After a full quarter of an hour of silence the Germans, believing that the crew had been destroyed and that the monster was helpless, surrounded it boldly and in considerable numbers. Thereupon, unmasking its machine-guns, and opening fire from its sides, the terrible creature began to hack them in bits, mow them down in heaps, drill them full of holes and slay them by the dozen.

A giant miller, grinding death!

An hour later, when the larger part of the English troops succeeded in reaching Beaucourt, they found the Germans, dead and dying, piled around the tank. The tank says little, but to the point.

Three cheers for Mademoiselle Devil's Delight!

CHAPTER III.

THE REAL SUPERMEN.

"We are consolidating our positions."

(English Communiqué, 16th November.)

Here is a story.

Some time ago, on the North bank of the Ancre, in the Beaumont-Hamel Sector, everyone was affected with a curious boredom. Nothing happened: very little artillery fire; not so much as a pretence at an attack. It was a dead calm. The bombs were all asleep. Muscles grew slack. Enthusiasm staled. Boredom, that worst misery of trench life, reigned supreme.

One evening this slackness among the troops—and it was as bad on one side as on the other—produced a curious result. Among the Germans, a homesick Silesian began to sing some of the carols of his own country. His voice rose freshly into the fresh night. At the same time on the English side, a Highlander, stirred by the sweetness of the autumn evening, blew a few shrill notes upon his fife. The voice of the man and the fife supported one another, and so a concert began, a concert of old songs, the simple happy songs of the peasant. The English shouted to the Germans, "Give us Gott Strafe England!" and the Germans obliged with the "Song of Hate." "Encore! Encore!" cried the Highlander, whose fife was seeking to catch the air that the enemy was singing. The song began again, the fife supporting it. Then it was taken up by all the English. But to what sort of a rhythm! The "Song of Hate," slow as plain song, had suddenly become, as it crossed the trenches, a crazy, jerky, rollicking ragtime, a tune for the can-can. The Germans supposed that they were being chaffed. By way of applause, they let fly a shower of bombs. To this compliment the English replied in kind. Then the night closed down upon a boredom more dreadful than ever.

I have told you this story as a sort of commentary upon the epigram in which a certain colonel explained this very successful two days' battle: "Our attack, like our victory, was an impromptu."

To capture three villages and eleven lines of the enemy's defences upon a front 3-1/2 miles wide and nearly 1-1/2 deep, is pretty good. To take a haul of nearly 6,000 prisoners out of their dug-outs and caves and other quarters—that is not to be sneezed at either. But to organise the territory that has been taken and to consolidate it, working night and day under the constant fire of the enemy—that is perhaps a less glorious business, but it is a thing more difficult to accomplish than any attack.

For two long hours of the night my friend Ruffin, of the Agence Havas, and I, conducted by our guide, the major, tramped it through the trenches in order to reach those which lie under Beaumont. Steel helmet on head, first-aid equipment and gas mask under arm, we went on between the two walls of this roundabout road, our feet sticky with mud and our eyes continually dazzled. Rockets soared into the air to burst and then go out like those Roman candles which blossom into sprays of slowly moving stars. One might have thought that some unseen juggler, over there on the blazing skyline, was manipulating huge fiery plates.

The trenches were swarming with soldiers, the reliefs who were going back to billets, and the reserves who were taking their places; the sappers and pioneers, with their picks and shovels, who, protected by the machine-guns, repair the shelters wherever