dress-rehearsal by Naours which we attended at the end of April. Thiepval village is on the German side of our front line. [Illustration: THE SOMME FRONT. BRITISH.] So we reach by gradual delimitation, by a _diminuendo_ process, as it were, the task allotted to Major-General Perceval, Commanding the 49th Division, on July 1st, 1916.[57] ‘Z’ day has arrived at last. The vast plans for the relief of Verdun are now about to be set in motion. Home Governments have expressed their approval, and have sent the munitions and the men. Due weight has been given to outside considerations in this war on many fronts: to the needs of Italy and Russia, the disappointment of Germany at sea, the inclination of the United States of America. From the dunes of Calais to the Picardy hills, north-west France has become an armed camp, with the ceaseless movement of the immense accumulation of animate and inanimate material which nearly two years’ experience has proved to be essential for modern warfare. All the while, as Sir Douglas Haig reminds us in his great Second Despatch, ‘the rôle of the other armies holding our defensive line ... was neither light nor unimportant. While required to give precedence in all respects to the Somme battle, they were responsible for the security of the line held by them and for keeping the enemy on their front constantly on the alert.’ Verily, a huge organization to be stated in terms of unit action and of the prowess of individual men. It was a long way from Sir Douglas Haig to Aveluy Wood: the 49th was only one of five Divisions (the 12th, 25th, 32nd, 36th and 49th), which composed the Xth Corps of the Fifth Army. Our business lies between Authuille and Thiepval. We have fined down the vaster issues to the operations east of Authuille, where the British line bulged towards the Ancre in an ugly angle known as the Leipsic Salient. The fighting to which we now come is all round and about that Salient, between the point where the British front line crossed the River Ancre at Hamel to the point where it met the Albert-Bapaume road. If we realize that the object of this fighting was to straighten and push back that bulge, and so to contribute to the advance of the long Allied line on the Somme battlefield, we may return to the men who fought there in the early days of July, 1916. It is one thing to show on a map, on however large a scale, the increasing depth of the British front line at various dates after July 1st; it is another thing to visualize that line in the actual mud, trees, slopes, which composed it, and to recount the conditions day by day, under which it swayed forward and back, in front and beyond and across the magnificently fortified German trenches. Take the 7th West Yorkshires, for example.