The South Africans, as they moved east from Corbie along the Picardy downs, beheld a landscape which, in the heat and dust of midsummer, must have recalled their own country. The Somme, with its acres of swamp and broad lagoons, was not unlike some river of the bushveld. The “tawny ground,” which Shakespeare’s Henry V. had summoned his men to colour with their blood, had something of the air of the high-veld—yellow-green ridges and slopes falling away to an infinite distance. As they topped the hill behind Méaulte and faced the long lift of land towards Bapaume, they had the kind of spectacle which is common enough beyond the Vaal. In the hollows around the water-courses was the light green of crops; then a great stretch of unfenced country patched with woods, which were curiously clean-cut like the coppices in the park of a country house. It was such a view as a man may see from Haenertsberg, looking north towards the Woodbush. The weather, too, was the soft, shimmering mist which one meets on the edge of the Berg. Our bombardment had only just begun, and the countryside was not yet devastated. Fricourt was still a pleasant woodland village, Bernafay and Trônes were as yet little forests, and the spire of Mametz church was more than a tooth of masonry. * * * * * The story of the Battle of the Somme belongs to history written on a larger scale than this, for here we are concerned with only a part of it. But to understand that part it is necessary to grasp the purpose of the whole action. The enemy was suffering from a lack of immediate reserves, and the depression of _moral_ due to his failure at Verdun and the recent successes of Brussilov in Galicia. He had boasted so loudly of his “war map,” and the amount of conquered territory which he held, that he dared not resort to the expedient of shortening his long line. He trusted to the great natural and artificial strength of his positions in the West to repel the Allies, whatever weight of men and guns might be brought against him. In no part of the Western front were these positions stronger than between Arras and the Somme, where he held in the main the higher ground, and had in the rear many fortified woods and villages which could be linked together into reserve lines.