I was not fated to hear the end of Edgecumbe's story. I had barely finished reading the letter, when events happened in quick succession which made it impossible for me to hear those things which he declared made all life new to him. It must be remembered that we were in the early part of July, when the great battle of the Somme was gaining intensity at every hour, and when private experiences were at a discount. Each day the tornado of the great guns became more and more terrible, the air was full of the shrieks of shells, while the constant pep-pep-pep of machine-guns almost became monotonous. Village after village south of the Ancre fell into our hands, thousands of German prisoners were taken, while deadly fighting was the order of the day. It is no use trying to describe it, it cannot be described. Incidents here and there can be visualized, and to an extent made plain by words; but the movement as a whole, the constant roar of guns, the shriek of shells, the sulphur of explosives, the march of armies, the bringing in of prisoners, and our own wounded men, cover too vast a field for any one picture. It was not one battle, it was a hundred battles, and each battle was more intense than the other. Position after position was taken, some of which were lost again, only to be retaken, amidst the thunder of guns and the groans of dying men. If ever Tennyson's martial poem were true, it was true in that great struggle. Not that cavalry had much to do with it, neither was there any pageantry or any of the panoply of war. It was all too grim, too ghastly, too sordid for that. And yet there was a pageantry of which Tennyson never dreamed. The boom of guns, the weird light of the star shells, the sulphurous atmosphere, the struggle of millions, formed a pageant so Homeric, and on such an awful scale, that imagination reels before it. It was towards the middle of July when my battalion was ordered south of the Ancre. What had become of Edgecumbe I did not know, and it was impossible to find out. Each battalion, each company, and each platoon, had its little scene of operations, and we knew nothing of who might be a few hundred yards from us. As an infantry officer, I was, during the advance, for the most time in the trenches. Then, after the artillery had done its work, we leapt the parapets, and made our way across the open, oft-times through a hailstorm of bullets, while shrieking shells fell and exploded at our feet. Now we were held up by barbed wire, which here and there had not been swept away by our artillery, or again we stumbled into shell holes, where we lay panting and bruised. But these are only small incidents in the advance.