Victory is sweet. It writes itself. Perhaps because failure is harder to write, though in this case it is equally glorious, we shall have this first. To make the picture of that day clearer, imagine a movement of the whole arm, with the shoulder at Gommecourt and the fist swinging in at Montauban, crushing its way against those fortifications. It broke through for a distance of more than from the elbow to the fingers' ends twenty miles southward from Thiepval--a name to bear in mind. Men crossing the open under protecting waves of shell fire had proved that men in dugouts with machine guns were not invincible. From a certain artillery observation post in a tree you had a good view of Thiepval, already a blackened spot with the ruins of the chateau showing white in its midst and pricked by the toothpick-like trunks of trees denuded of their limbs, which were to become such a familiar sight on the battlefield. It was uphill all the way to Thiepval for the British. A river so-called, really a brook, the Ancre, runs at the foot of the slope and turns eastward beyond Thiepval, where a ridge called Crucifix Ridge north-east of the village takes its name from a Christ with outstretched arms visible for many miles around. Then on past the bend of the Ancre the British and the German positions continued to the Gommecourt salient. Along these five miles the odds of terrain were all against the British. The high ground which they sought to gain was of supreme tactical value. Nature was an ally of soldierly industry in constructing defenses. The German staff expected the brunt of the offensive in this sector and every hour's delay in the attack was invaluable for their final preparations. Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel and Gommecourt would not be yielded if there were any power of men or material at German command to keep them. Indeed, the Germans said that Thiepval was impregnable. Their boast was good on July 1st but not in the end, as we shall see, for, before the summer was over, Thiepval was to be taken with less loss to the British than to the defenders. At Beaumont-Hamel and Thiepval, particularly, and in all villages house cellars had been enlarged and connected by new galleries, the debris from the buildings forming a thicker roof against penetration by shells. Where there had seemed no life in Beaumont-Hamel battalions were snug in their refuges as the earth around trembled from the explosions. Those shell-threshed parapets of the first-line German trenches which appeared to represent complete destruction had not filled in all the doorways of dugouts which big shells had failed to reach. The cut and twisted fragments of barbed wire which were the remains of the maze of entanglements fringing the parapets no longer protected them from a charge; but the garrisons depended upon another kind of defense which sent its deadly storms against the advancing infantry.