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 him the only one able to do nothing. But I wisht I'd been a musicaner.")

The Diary for the 24th March merely says, "remained in same positions," and refers to "repeated rumours." They sent their first-line transport back out of harm's way, and went on digging. Yet the 24th was a day no rumour could have painted much blacker than it was. From directly in front of the Guards Division at Boisleux, the line of the German gains in the past forty-eight hours dropped straight south to the Somme at Cléry, and thence skirted its western bank to Ham, where it broke across to the wide marshes of the Oise below La Fère. Two thirds of the hard-bought ground of the Somme campaign, the scores of villages whose names smelt of blood, were lost, and the harvesting of the remainder was a matter barely of hours.

Next day saw Béhagnies, Grévillers, Irles of the wired bastions, Miraumont, Pys, Courcelette, Contalmaison, Thiepval and its myriad dead, and Pozières of the Australians—the very hearts of the deadliest of the first fightings—overrun; and the question rose in men's minds whether the drive would end, as was intended, in the splitting apart of the French and British armies. For what was happening north of the Somme was play to the situation south of it. There the enemy's swarms of aeroplanes harried the Amiens hospitals, driving the civilians into the broadside of the country behind, where the moonlight nights betrayed them to fresh hosts in the air.

By the 26th March the tongue of the advancing tide had licked past Noyon and Roye and, next day, had encircled Montdidier. Meantime, our old Somme base on the Ancre, whence the great fights were fed and supplied from the hundred camps and dumps round Méaulte, and the railway-sidings between Albert and Amiens, had passed into the enemy's hands. To all human appearance, the whole of our bitter year's effort was abolished, as though it had never been. The enemy had prepared, brought together, and struck at the time