The British Armies rose out of their ditches for the great attack with an ardour that had never been seen before in the history of war, and in my judgment will never be seen again. They believed that at last—after artillery duels deciding nothing, after muddled battles like that of Loos, mining and counter-mining, and trench raids, and the gain of little salients at murderous cost—they were going to “do the trick” and end the war by irresistible attack. I saw the glory of those young men and the massacres of their bodies and hopes. At the first assault, after the greatest bombardment ever seen yet still leaving forests of barbed wire and a fortress system of trenches and tunnels twenty miles deep behind the German front lines, they were mown down in swathes by German machine-gun fire, and afterwards, in isolated positions to which they staggered, blown to bits by German gun fire. By desperate courage they smashed through the outer earthworks of that infernal trench-system; for five months they fought through that twenty miles, yard by yard; but it was sheer slaughter all the way, and they were the victims of atrocious staff work, incompetent generalship, ruthless disregard of human life, repeated and dreadful blundering. The British Generals cannot be blamed. They were amateurs doing their best in an unknown type of war. They had to learn by failures and by mistakes. Perhaps their mistakes were not worse than those of the enemy’s High Command; or not much worse. But for the men it was Hell. They were ordered to attack isolated positions, which often they captured although the whole arc of German gun fire for forty miles around was switched on to their bodies until they were annihilated. High Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Mametz Wood—a hundred more—are names that bleed with the memory of enormous sacrifice of British youth. In the end they won through to open ground and forced the enemy into a far retreat to the shelter of the Hindenburg line.