Our group was not particularly religious, but I think that we were all uttering a prayer for England and France. At seven-thirty something seemed to crack in our brains. There was no visible sign that a wave of men twenty-five miles long, reaching from Gommecourt to Soyecourt, wherever the trenches ran across fields, through villages and along slopes to the banks of the Somme and beyond, had left their parapets. I knew the men who were going into that charge too well to have any apprehension that any battalion would falter. The thing was to be done and they were to do it. Now they were out in No Man's Land; now they were facing the reception prepared for them. Thousands might already be down. We could discern that the German guns, long waiting for their prey, were seeking it in eager ferocity as they laid their curtains of fire on the appointed places which they had registered. The hell of the poets and the priests must have some emotion, some temperamental variation. This was sheer mechanical hell, its pulse that of the dynamo and the engine. Seven-forty-five! Helplessly we stared at the blanket. If the charge had gone home it was already in the German trenches. For all we knew it might have been repulsed and its remnants be struggling back through the curtains of artillery fire and the sweep of machine gun fire. As the sun came out without clearing away the mist and shell-smoke over the field we had glimpses of some reserves who had looked like a yellow patch behind a hill deploying to go forward, suggestive of yellow-backed beetles who were the organized servitors of a higher mind on some other planet. This was all we saw; and to make more of it would not be fair to other occasions when views of attacks were more intimate. Yet I would not change the impression now. It has its place in the spectator's history of the battle. VI FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME At the little schoolhouse--Twenty miles of German fortifications taken--Doubtful situation north of Thiepval--Prisoners and wounded--Defeat and victory--The topography of Thiepval--Sprays of bullets and blasts of artillery fire--"The day" of the New Army--The courage of civilized man--Fighting with a kind of divine stubbornness--Braver than the "Light Brigade"--Died fighting as final proof of the New Army's spirit--Crawling back through No Man's Land--Not beaten but roughly handled. In the room at the head of the narrow stairs in the schoolhouse of the quiet headquarters town we should have the answer to the question, Has the British attack succeeded? which was throbbing in our pulsebeats. By the same map on the table in the center of the room showing the plan of attack with its lines indicating the objectives we should learn how many of them had been gained. The officer who had outlined the plan of battle with fine candor was equally candid about its results, so far as they were known. Not only did he avoid mincing words, but he avoided wasting them.