Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/191

 and "that canteen at Louvencourt" is a landmark of old memories.

By this date the battle of the Somme was six weeks old, and our troops had eaten several—in some places as much as five or six—thousand yards deep into the area. Two main attacks had been delivered—that of the 1st July, which had lasted till the 14th, and that of the 14th, which went on till the end of the month. From Serre to Ovillers-la-Boiselle the Germans' front stood fast; from Ovillers-la-Boiselle to the junction with the French armies at Hardecourt, the first tremendous system of their defence had been taken literally a few score yards at a time, trench by trench, village by village, quarry by quarry, and copse by copse, lost, won, and held again from three to eight or nine times. A surge forward on some part of the line might succeed in making good a few hundred yards of gain without too heavy loss. An isolated attack, necessary to clear a flank or to struggle towards some point of larger command, withered under enormous far concentrations of enemy guns, even as the woods withered to snapped, charred stickage. At every step and turn, hosts of machine-guns at ground-level swept and shaved the forlorn landscapes; and when the utmost had been done for the day, the displaced Germans seemed always to occupy the crest of some yet higher down. Villages and woods vanished in the taking; were stamped into, or blown out of, the ground, leaving only their imperishable names. So, in the course of inconceivable weeks fell Mametz and the ranked woods behind it, Contalmaison, Montauban, and Caterpillar Wood, Bernafay, Trônes Wood, Longueval, and the fringe of Delville (even then a charnel-house among shattered stumps), both Bazentins, and Pozières of the Australians. The few decencies and accommodations of the old settled trench-life were gone; men lived as best they could in the open among eternal shell-holes and mounds of heaped rubbish that were liable at any moment to be dispersed afresh; under constant menace of gas, blinded