United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The relation would have made him not only fully aware of the reasons why Charles was diverted from his hot pursuit of the Somme towns, but thoroughly informed as to the great obstacles lying in the path which the duke hoped to travel. Naturally, the king was quite willing to rest assured that ruin was inevitable.
Credit for the trial use of the aeroplane to link artillery with infantry belongs to the British, though the French at Verdun first brought the method to practical success. We then developed the idea on the Somme with notable results.
There are little places here and there, few enough as the Arabs know, that the Sahara's deadly sand has never been able to devastate; and there are places even in the Somme that German malice, obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara obeys the accursed sirocco, has not been able to destroy quite to the uttermost.
The Canadians were back again. During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was the capital of the British army.
"Well, just before we came to this billet to rest we were in a tightish corner on the Somme. One of my youngest men was hit a shell came near to taking his arm clean off, so that it was left just hanging to his shoulders. He was only about eighteen years old, poor chap. It was a bad wound, but, as sometimes happens, it didn't make him unconscious then.
Once, on the Somme in the fall of 1916, when I had been over the top and was being carried back somewhat disfigured but still in the ring, a cockney stretcher bearer shot this question at me: "Hi sye, Yank. Wot th' bloody 'ell are you in this bloomin' row for? Ayen't there no trouble t' 'ome?" And for the life of me I couldn't answer.
But I do not believe for a moment that this people can go back after the war to the attitude by which each of those families was to all the others only so much prospective monetary gain or loss. France, November 13th. Last week an Australian force made its attack in quite a different area of the Somme battle. The sky was blue in patches, with cold white clouds between. The wind drove icily.
We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white wine in a sheltered cut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gained at such an appalling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major described to me some features of the Lens battle, in which he had taken part. I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at the Somme.
The battles of the Somme were to come before the next Christmas; though none of us on that boat knew it then. And where is the young officer who went ashore under the electric glare of the base port, singing also, and bearing a Christmas tree?
The "big push," as it was popularly called in England, was started by the British and French on both sides of the River Somme, sixty miles north of Paris, at 7:30 o 'clock on the morning of July 1, and resulted on the same day in a great wedge being driven into the German lines along a front of twenty-five miles, with its sharp point penetrating nearly five miles.
Word Of The Day