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Updated: May 24, 2025
Plans at headquarters A battle by inches In the observation post The débris of a ruined village "Softening" by shell fire A slice out of the front The task of the infantryman The dawn before the attack Five minutes more A wave of men twenty-five miles long Mist and shell-smoke Duty of the war-correspondent.
To "camouflet" became a new English verb British planes tested out a battery's visibility from the air. Landscape painters were called in to assist in the deceit. One was set to "camouflet" the automobile van for the pigeons which, carried in baskets on the men's backs in charges, were released as another means of sending word of the progress of an attack obscured in the shell-smoke.
An audacious battery "An unusual occasion" Guns to the front at night Close to the firing-line Not so dangerous for observers The German lines near by Advantages of even a gentle slope Skilfully chosen German positions A game of hide and seek with death Business-like progress Haze, shell-smoke and moving figures Each figure part of the "system."
The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical precision.
Where early in the morning it had appeared as if the attack were succeeding reserve battalions were sent in to the support of those in front, and as unhesitatingly and steadily as at drill they entered the blanket of shell-smoke with its vivid flashes and hissing of shrapnel bullets and shell-fragments. Commanders, I found, stood in awe of the steadfast courage of their troops.
They saw the Ridge under its blanket of shell-smoke, the mighty columns of transport, all the complex, enormous organization of that secret world, peeked into German dugouts, and in common with all observers estimated the distance of the nearest shell-burst from their own persons.
This seemed to be the hottest place of all. I would watch it. Nothing except the blanket of shell-smoke hanging over the trees was visible for a time, unless you counted figures some distance away moving about in a sort of detached pantomime.
Shell-smoke opened out among them like a sponge thrown into the water. It swelled into larger clouds monstrous in shape as the things doctors preserve in bottles. But the plague did not rest. One saw a little black aeroplane hurry across them, a mere water beetle of a thing, and one wondered if a collision would send one of them to earth with broken wings.
The rest is for battalion historians, who will find themselves puzzled about an action where there was little range of vision and this obscured by shell-smoke and the preoccupation of each man trying to keep cover and do his own part to the death.
Rising out of the slopes toward the Ridge in green patches were three large woods, not to mention small ones, under a canopy of shell-smoke, Mametz, Bernafay and Trônes, with their orgies of combat hidden under their screens of foliage.
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