The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of it, came to me when I saw the German rockets rising beyond the villages of Mametz and Montauban and our barrage fire lifting to a range beyond the first lines of German trenches, and our support troops moving forward in masses to captured ground. We had broken through! By the heroic assault of our English and Scottish troops. West Yorks, Yorks and Lancs, Lincolns, Durhams, Northumberland Fusiliers, Norfolks and Berkshires, Liverpools, Manchesters, Gordons, and Royal Scots, all those splendid men I had seen marching to their lines. We had smashed through the ramparts of the German fortress, through that maze of earthworks and tunnels which had appalled me when I saw them on the maps, and over which I had gazed from time to time from our front-line trenches when those places seemed impregnable. I saw crowds of prisoners coming back under escort, fifteen hundred had been counted in the first day, and they had the look of a defeated army. Our lightly wounded men, thousands of them, were shouting and laughing as they came down behind the lines, wearing German caps and helmets. From Amiens civilians straggled out along the roads as far as they were allowed by military police, and waved hands and cheered those boys of ours. “Vive l'Angleterre!” cried old men, raising their hats. Old women wept at the sight of those gay wounded, the lightly touched, glad of escape, rejoicing in their luck and in the glory of life which was theirs still and cried out to them with shrill words of praise and exultation. “Nous les aurons les sales Boches! Ah, ils sont foutus, ces bandits! C'est la victoire, grace a vous, petits soldats anglais!” Victory! The spirit of victory in the hearts of fighting men, and of women excited by the sight of those bandaged heads, those bare, brawny arms splashed with blood, those laughing heroes. It looked like victory, in those days, as war correspondents, we were not so expert in balancing the profit and loss as afterward we became. When I went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last Germans, who had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the Yorkshires and Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had been so humiliated at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when the Manchesters and Gordons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban and repulsed fierce counter-attacks. It looked like victory, because of the German dead that lay there in their battered trenches and the filth and stench of death over all that mangled ground, and the enormous destruction wrought by our guns, and the fury of fire which we were still pouring over the enemy's lines from batteries which had moved forward.