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French troops, however, still held the line on the northern bank of the Somme near Mont St. Quentin, the key to Péronne. In the morning of January 21, 1917, the British forces made a successful raid on German trenches southeast of Loos. It was a short but spirited fight while it lasted.
I pictured the battlefield of the Somme as I had last seen it a sea of mud stretching for miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with the wreckage of what once were human bodies. I could not imagine what useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings. It seemed to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there.
The development of the campaign had given the Australians work suited to their bent when this war of machinery, attaining its supreme complexity on the Somme, left the human machine between walls of shell fire to fight it out individually against the human machine, in a contest of will, courage, audacity, alertness and resource, man to man.
The G.O.C. of the Division sent special congratulations on the success of the whole operation. For their conspicuous share in this success, 2nd Lieut. Hampshire received the M.C., Sergt. A. C. Evans, Corpl. H. Hart, Lance-Corpls. J. Mazey and G. W. Hutchings the M.M. Shortly after this the results of the weary and bloody months on the Somme battlefields became manifest.
In front of Souchez the Germans exploded a mine, and here some of their troops succeeded in entering the English trenches over the crater, but were quickly bombed out again. On the same date late in the afternoon the French forces to the north of the Somme carried out a well-planned attack which resulted in the capture of a line of German trenches between the Hem Wood and the river.
Something like a hundred have been found, and more are every now and then coming to light. Indeed, it may safely be said that there is scarcely a village between Arras and Amiens and between Roye and the sea, betwixt the courses of the Somme and Authie, that was not provided with these underground refuges. The character of all is very much the same.
This appears all the more clearly if we take into consideration the fact that the seventeen provinces extended in the past from the Zuyder Zee to the Somme, and that Bruges, and later on Antwerp, benefited largely from the trade of the Thames. This then is what is meant when Belgium is spoken of as being placed at "the cross-roads of Europe."
Old hands in the Somme battle become shell-wise. They are the ones whom the French call "varnished," which is a way of saying that projectiles glance off their anatomy. They keep away from points where the enemy will direct his fire as a matter of habit or scientific gunnery, and always recollect that the German has not enough shells to sow them broadcast over the whole battle area.
The French edition was printed in 1642 with the title, "La somme appelle Mirroir des Justices: vel speculum Justiciariorum, Factum per Andream Home." This book is very ancient, and of great authority for the time in which it was wrote, and with that character is often quoted by that great lawyer my Lord Coke.
Owing to the almost continuous bad weather, heavy rains, and snowfall, there was little fighting along the Somme during the succeeding days, but the bombardment of enemy positions was continuous, and the British took some prisoners in trench raids.
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