They trained in that wet at bombing, at assaulting from trenches, at visual signalling to aeroplanes, and at marking out trenches by night with white tapes, as scores of thousands had done before them, while the roar of the guns rose and dropped without explanation, like the tumult of unseen crowds; and rumours and contradictory orders for standing fast or leaving on the instant kept them in tension for ten days. But, most wonderful of all to the men from The Salient, where silence and guarded movement were automatic, was the loud life of this open-air world of troops around them--men and guns spread over the breadth of counties--horses in the open by thousands ranked in endless horse-lines--processions of roaring lorries and deep-rumbling heavy guns; and, only a few miles away--the war in full blast. It was possible to catch a ride in a lorry and go up and see “The War,” as the saying ran. Yonder, but a very little way, stretched horizons, downs, and tablelands as far as imagination could range. All the firmament groaned to the artillery hidden and striving within them; and statelily, and regularly and unceasingly, the vast spaces of open were plumed with vertical columns of changeful shell-smoke. Men perceived that everything they had known, till then, had been a field-day. Here was The War! A story that a wonderful new weapon would soon appear was very general. Some one had half-seen or been told about the tanks in their well-screened shelters; one or two over-zealous English journals had been industriously hinting at the developments of science; the enemy was uneasy, and, German-fashion, had issued portentous instruction to his men to be on their guard against something. But, however short his training, the British infantryman is a born scoffer. “We had heard about moving forts that weighed thirty ton,” said one of them. “Whatever it might be, we knew we’d have to take the thick o’ the coffee.” The local battles and operations on the southern stretch of the front, now immediately in front of the Battalion, were almost as indistinguishable as waves on a beach that melt into or rise out of each other in the main flood. But there was a fresh tidal movement at the beginning of September, when our whole line attacked again, in conjunction with the French. We gained nothing of any account in the north, but in the south Guillemont fell, and, after desperate attack and counter-attack, almost all of Ginchy and the whole thousand-yard-square of Delville Wood and the south end of High Wood.