Original subtitles

In 1915, for the soldiers on the Western Front, the new year brings stalemate.

In the months since World War I began, the

invading German army has failed to break through.

Now it faces the British and French allies along a

front line of trenches across France and Belgium.

For nearly four years, these men will engage in

the bitterest fight the world has ever known.

These years will bring an appalling new weapon, poison gas, a new illness,

shell shock, an extraordinary force, the mine.

And these years will produce a new and deadly expression going over the top.

It is a soldier's duty to charge against barbed wire and to just set in death,

often no one comes back.

If anybody tells you he went over the top and he wasn't scared, he's a dead liar.

The trench warfare on the Western Front will bring unprecedented horror.

And now, thanks to new computer technology, we

will see it the way these men saw it themselves.

As 1915 began, the question for the French Supreme Commander, Joseph Joffre,

and his British allies was how to break the stalemate on the Western Front.

The German army was encamped in French and Belgian territory

and facing the allies along a 475 mile line of trenches.

You couldn't just stand there and wait forever.

Something had to be done.

The Germans on the home were more or less content to sit there and say, okay,

you move us.

You kick us out.

We're staying.

And so it was up to the allies to try and break through this great long jam,

the essence of the Western Front war, until 1980, was attempt after attempt.

Mostly figures.

One or two successes here and there to break that long jam.

The spring of 1915 saw the allies' first concerted attempt to break the deadlock.

But commanders on both sides were soon to be

confronted with the hazards of trench warfare.

One was communications, which initially were only

possible through the courage of individual runners.

In the course of a battle, it is often necessary to send a runner with a message

under circumstances which involve certain death or wounding.

Yet never have I seen one of these carefully chosen men waver or hang back.

No matter how dangerous the end, the runner on duty never once called in twice.

He will pick up his rifle and be off, often to his death.

It might take hours for a message to travel a little more than a few hundred yards.

And that of course meant that by the time the general received the information and

tried to act upon it, the situation the front line had changed dramatically.

And this is one of the major handicaps that

commanders of the First World War had to contend with.

It was in this fog of war that the major offensives of 1915 began.

The allies devised a two pronged operation to push back the Germans.

The French would attack obviously at Fester Beyer.

British and French high command had come to believe that one more big push in the

spring would break through the German trenches

and reopen mobile warfare on the western front.

But the battles fought at Fester Beyer and in Artois in May 1915 simply show that

that was not going to happen, that the war was going to go on.

And the British realised that their army simply was not big enough to sustain

losses on this scale in this sort of warfare.

The campaign of spring 1915 took a devastating toll.

The allies suffered hundreds of thousands, killed, wounded and taken prisoner.

The British had traditionally had a small standing army.

Their strength was in their navy.

But the recruiting campaign must have minded by

Lord Kitchener was producing a new mass of soldiers.

To the professional soldier, these recruits presented an astonishing sight.

The British civilian had taken over the war.

Many of the straight-spined old soldiers looked to scans of the civilian warrior

and indeed the civilian underarms presented

many a strange sight to our conservative eyes.

He was undersized.

He slouched.

He was bespectacled.

He wore uniform in a careless way.

He saluted awkwardly and was very clumsy with his weapons.

The old army was distinctly queasy about the future.

Kitcheners' men saw their first significant

action in September 1915 at the Battle of Luce.

The aim in collaboration with French forces to

the south was to break through German lines.

But it turned into the standard pattern of battle.

Artillery bombardment followed by infantry

men going over the top, followed by slaughter.

The ground was sprinkled with dead and dying heroes but we had no time to stop

and look at them and soon got used to those ghastly faces.

Many layers they fell and one actually had a letter in his hand

as though he had managed to read it through before he died.

Luce was the first time a large British army took

very heavy casualties in one battle, some 43,000.

The British responded by appointing a new commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig,

the slaughter on the western front had only just begun.

As the war stretched into its second year, hundreds of thousands of men from

different nations headed for the front line and its unfamiliar terrace.

One dominated, going over the top.

It is utterly impossible to describe one's

feelings during the hours waiting for zero power.

The lives full of wild fruits, which are utterly beyond control.

Recollections of friends and dear ones, places we have seen and known and

different phases of life all seem to pass and review before one's eyes.

We live absolutely from what made it to the other,

or don't know whether it will be our last or not.

That was the atmosphere that we lived in the trenches.

They had to just wait and listen to the order because just of them were so great

that all they had to do was to wait to listen for orders and obey them immediately.

And everyone was ready and waiting for the order to go over.

We must lose a lot more men, but the men are only too willing to take their chance.

It makes me awfully proud to belong to a nation who, when they're warned for a show

like this, knowing what it means, cheer and start singing and whistling.

I always tell the prayer, you know that someone loves you so laugh at me.

But I owe just God to let me fight like a man and bring back to heaven sound.

If anybody tells you he went over the top and he wasn't scared, he's a dead liar.

Because you never knew from what it is in the next, whether

that dark age was wrong with your number on a label.

The men being sent to the front were nothing without their weapons and the

artillery that was supposed to support them.

But the endless pounding was bringing with it a crisis of supply.

Before the First World War, the British Army

was a standing army of only about 200,000 men.

Now our armaments industry was only geared up to

provide uniform equipment and weapons for 200,000 men.

In fact, when Haig takes command, he says, we will not be able to fight a

major offensive action until the middle of 1917, because he knew that until then we

were never going to have heavy industry to provide us with enough guns and shells and

the ability to fight that campaign any earlier.

The answer was a huge mobilization of women to work in the munitions factories.

Handling explosives was unpleasant, dirty and dangerous.

It was all bright ginger.

All our front hair and all our faces were bright yellow.

This doctor was looking at us all one day and

he said, half you girls will never have babies.

God help you.

Some of them suffer very badly.

They were known as the canaries because the handling

TNT explosives produced made their skin go yellow.

Some of them really suffered appalling damage.

Stained hands and coppery hair, what are these?

Do we fear temporary disfigurement when men for the same cause of facing death and

not permanent disfigurement of maimed limbs or blinded eyes?

The munitions made by the women at home were the

vital engines for their men at the front blind.

But their effect on the individual mind could be shattering.

I marvel myself sometimes how human nerves can stand the strain of our existence.

Day after day, night after night, hour after hour, a heavy shell falling

every few minutes within a few yards of you.

Shaking ground beneath you, half stunning you would crash at the explosion.

The birds were so great that it deprived one of thought really.

The birds were so great that it deprived one of thought really.

Shaking ground on the ballads were terrible, terrible.

How did anybody ever survive?

I don't know.

I picked up a piece of shell boats, which is long, half

of each wide jagged edge to it, right in the groin.

Doctor came along and he said, would you like me to take that shrapnel out?

And the pain from it was terrific.

And he said, no, before you were saying, yes, we'd

go out of the setting and they'd camp whatsoever.

And I said, no, no, will you be?

He said, well, about two minutes.

So I thought from the last night, I'd go ahead with them.

And in those two minutes, I could have killed that bloody doctor.

These massive artillery barrages brought a new phenomenon.

Shell shock.

My leave from the front in the last days of 1915 was a nightmare.

My sleep was broken full of noises and voices of the war.

The voices were those of officers and men who were dead.

One morning I was discovered standing up in bed

facing a wall ready to repel an imaginary dawn attack.

I had a real physical pain in my heart.

I had loved many men and lost them.

You know, why do I shell shock?

You just couldn't move.

He seemed to take all the services out of you.

And if a fellow had shell shock and he couldn't

go up that ladder, he was shot as a coward.

He was no more a bloody coward than me.

The trenches produced something else that was new and terrible, poison gas.

Chlorine was first used by the Germans in

early 1915, soon to be imitated by the Allies.

The faces of the lads who lay in the open

changed color and presented a gruesome spectacle.

Their faces and hands gradually assumed a blue and green color.

Many lay there with their legs drawn up and clutching their throats.

We used this tube which fitted them out and used to breathe through this cloth and

then it took down and the next oil gas couldn't get under.

I only remember being in one gas attack and that wasn't enough for me.

But I kept mine on, but it turned out after they wouldn't have thought that they

couldn't stand it any longer, they pulled it off.

My respirator fell to pieces with a continual removal and re-adjustment.

The gas closed my eyes and filled them with matter and I couldn't see.

I were left lying in trench with one other gas man and various wounded beings and

corpses and forced to lie and spit, coffin gasped the whole day in that trench.

By 1916, this trench war had led nowhere.

Both sides knew they had to do something.

The Germans set their sights on the French fortress town of Verdun.

The German commander-in-chief, General Erich von Falconheim, believed

that Verdun was such an important symbol for the French

that they would expend any number of lives to protect it.

His idea in attacking Verdun was not to take Verdun, but was to turn it into a

kind of separating saw in which the French would fill.

They had to pour all their resources to try and hold

this sacred city on the edge of their frontiers.

So the French fought for Verdun and the Germans and the French became involved in

one of the most appalling killing matches in history.

Falconheim had understood the French psyche.

Henri Petain, who would lead the defence of

Verdun, saw it as a symbol of national pride.

Verdun is menace and Verdun is not for.

The capture of this city would constitute for the Germans an inestimable success.

On the 21st of February 1916, the German bombardment began.

Petain's troops lined up to resist.

My heart let, as I saw our lads going into the furnace of Verdun, but I also

reflected that they would pass too rapidly from the enthusiasm of the first

engagement to the weariness brought by suffering.

Our time at Verdun has been awful.

Our faces have nothing human about them.

For 16 days we have neither washed nor slept.

Life has been spent amongst the dead and dying,

hardships of every certain incessant anguish.

Our cheetah, hollow, beards long, and our clothes tick with murder.

It was depressing to see the troops when they returned.

Their expressions seemed frozen by a vision of terror.

Their postures betrayed a total dejection.

They sagged beneath the weight of horrifying memories.

When I spoke to them, they could hardly reply.

Despite the German onslaught, the French resupplied the fortress week after week,

along a road that became known as the sacred way.

Falkenhine s plan was only partially working.

That sacred way became a kind of symbol of France's determination to resist,

and so even though he thought he could bleed France

white and he hit France very hard, he did not do so.

He, in fact, roused French's patriotism to an extent that had never been seen before.

The battle of Verdun went on until November.

Each side suffered some 350,000 casualties.

Of these, around 100,000 from both France and Germany were dead or missing.

As Verdun ground on, France looked to her main ally for help.

The British would attack the Germans at the Somme.

The British intended that the Somme offensive would break clean through the

centre of the German line and lead to a rapid advance.

Some men were told by their officers the artillery bombardment would be so enormous.

They'd only have to climb out of their trenches and walk through the opposition.

Rumour has it that we're going to smash the Hund Line

altogether, shove in our army and finish the war.

Rumour also says that we have given Germany four

days to declare peace or face the consequences.

I'm not addicted to boasting, but I think if he could see all the guns behind,

all the grenades, trench mortars and other stores in front, if he knew how thoroughly

ready we are, the Kaiser would cut his losses and take poison.

The seven-day bombardment began on June the 24th.

15,000 guns lined up along a 20-mile front.

The infantry waited.

My own sweetheart.

Before lying down, I must send my wee girl a few lines.

I got your letter today and you seem quite cheery.

All my love, my darling girl, and keep a brave heart for my sake, and just pray

that this war will soon be over, and I can come back

and take care of you and never leave you anymore.

All my love and lots of sweet kisses.

Willie.

William Clark would die on the first day.

Others like Arthur Hubbard would survive.

I hope we shall be successful on Saturday morning, July 1st at dawn, when you are

all fast asleep, in driving the Huns out of their

present position, and without any bad luck to myself.

I can imagine how everything looks at home.

The garden, as you say, must be almost at its best.

You will soon be having beans, I presume.

I'm your affectionate brother, Arthur.

They were massing to go over the top, fateful words for all infantrymen.

The timid were less fearful, the bold, more exultant,

and were thrilled and intensely alive as they fell in.

All the rounders, and in front, men dropped and staggered about.

A yellow mass of shrapnel would burst, and a section of

men in two deep formation would crumple up and be gone.

We led our section in and out of the stricken men, who were beyond help,

or whom we couldn't stop to help.

It seemed callous, but it was splendid war.

Kenneth McCartle would die on the song a few weeks later.

For many of the volunteers of 1914, this was their right of passage.

This was what they'd come to France to do, not to sit

in trenches, but to beat the Germans at their own game.

The trouble was it didn't happen as it was meant to be.

On this beautiful July morning, attacking at 7.30 in broad daylight,

the sight of men marching across No Man's

Land, hopefully, to take their targets at will.

This was met by an absolute tirade, a torrent

of machine-gun fire from the other side.

The war on the western front was not even halfway through.

Still, there was no breakthrough.

Only death.

By the end of the first day of the song, 19,000 men on the British side were dead,

a further 40,000 wounded.

The worst day in the whole of British warfare.

The British, even if they had wanted to break off the Battle of the Somme after

the disastrous first day, could have done so, because it was

necessary to fight on the Somme to relieve pressure on Verdun.

The strategic value of their sacrifice meant little to the soldiers on the Somme.

Dear Mother, just a few lines to let you know I am safe and thank God for it.

Mother, don't tell Quinn's mother or Arch's mother, but they

must be killed or drove in a road fellow left but myself.

All the world is forever dead to Vaudry, Kenworthy, Chesham, Sprout, Ford,

and of the other ranks, we do not know how many.

Young Victor was killed.

His problem of marriage to a woman six years his senior finally settled.

We were about 400 strong tonight.

We who went in 800.

One particular casualty of the first day of the

Somme was the concept of the Powell's battalions.

The Powell's battalions raised locally in which lots of friends from football clubs,

tennis clubs, dramatic societies, churches joined up as groups.

This was going to be the great thing in 1914.

In 1916, it became the great tragedy because men who

had gone together to fight had died together as well.

And whole streets were plunged in the morning.

On both sides, illusion was replaced by reality.

What was a man's life in this wilderness?

But the air was laden with a stench of thousands upon thousands of decaying bodies.

Death lay in ambush for each one, in every shell hole, merciless.

And making one merciless in return, chivalry here took a final farewell.

Not a tree stands, not a square foot of surface as escaped mutilation.

There is nothing but the mud and the gaping shell holes, a chaotic wilderness

of shell holes, and in the bottom of many, the bodies of the dead.

The Germans, after the battle of the Somme said,

we must save the men from another Somme battle.

If the Somme battle was a trauma for the British, it was also for the Germans.

In the course of four and a half months, the Allies advanced just seven miles,

with 600,000 casualties.

German losses were just as great.

The winter of 1916 was the coldest for many years.

The ground remained frozen until April.

Sickness in the trenches, trench fever, and dysentery rose alarmingly.

But even during the lull, the killing did not stop.

Artillery, mortars, machine guns, snipers, and

small trench raids kept the casualty list mounting.

Commanding began for new big offensives in 1917.

Both sides had to restock and bring in munitions.

But for the soldiers in the trenches, what

counted most were their few constellations.

There are two things that really, really matter to frontline soldiers,

and that's food and their post, that really is the most important thing.

And the British Army Postal Service was incredibly good.

It really was.

I mean, letters from the front line to home and back

again, were literally just taking about two days.

I mean, that's better than the mail service can manage today.

There were senders parcels with cakes, mostly tins of things, like tins of

coffee, tins of milk, condensed milk, or skimmer, the

other milk that was very much popular at that time.

Anything in a tin that would be useful to us would be sent and we'd share it.

Socks?

Well, if you had a barrel of socks or had holes, it...

Okay.

Socks are yours.

And that's how we shared everything.

We shared our families as well.

And we would read one of those letters sometimes.

Oh, we'd be out of office watching those two girls at that time.

As well as the men in the trenches, 1916 took its toll of the top brass.

von Falkenheim was sacked for the failure at Verdun, and replaced by Paul von

Hindenburg and Eric von Ludendorff, who'd beaten the Russians back in 1914.

They realized that the heavy German casualties of 1916 meant German forces on

the long western front were now spread too thin.

They constructed a formidable new defensive system called the Hindenburg

Line, a four-mile deep barricade of concrete fortifications.

On the Allied side, the new British Prime Minister David Lloyd George wanted to sack

Douglas Haig, the architect of the Somme campaign, but Haig survived.

His public standing was too high.

The French by contrast sacked their commander,

Joseph Joff, and replaced him with Robert Nivelle.

Nivelle believed that an improved combination of continuous artillery

bombardment and rapid infantry advance could rupture the German line.

Nivelle decided to try out his theory in the rolling countryside of Cheman de Danne.

His plan included a supporting attack by the British at Arras,

which would start a week earlier and draw off German reserves.

On the 9th of April, 1917, the British attacked.

Tomorrow morning, Ernie, we go over the top and hope to give the Bosch hell.

I have very confidence in my battalion.

They will fight to the Finnish, if necessary.

I told them that there was only one good Bosch, and that was a dead one.

If only we could give the Hun a real good licking.

I think he will be inclined to cave in.

The beginning of Arras was a pretty successful British attack.

The Canadians took Vimi Ridge and further south, some British divisions carried out

the longest single advance in any day of trench warfare up to that point,

about three and a half miles.

But the British had not yet learned to follow up such a breakthrough quickly,

and Arras turned into a month-long battle of attrition.

Now it was the French Army's turn, at Shema de Dan.

But Nivelle's plan was flawed.

For a start, he was careless about security,

and the Germans got to hear of the operation.

In addition, the German army was already withdrawing to its new defensive positions.

This meant much of the ground Nivelle planned to take was now his anyway.

And the new German army was immensely strong, and overlooked the positions in

which the French infantry and artillery would form up for their assault.

On the 16th of April, the French attacked.

Are we advanced?

Are we get through?

Are we all not blown to pieces at every step nobody knows?

We stumble on explosions everywhere, we fall flat, get up again, it's raining,

we are swimming in mud, but we go forward in a hurry to escape this violence,

to get there at last, to find perhaps worse steel.

It's impossible to get through this zone on our own.

In one night, more cannon shells were fired than any of Napoleon's campaigns.

These men exhausted, poorly fed, stuck in the muddy trenches, took the

order to attack, grumbling to themselves, not everybody can be a hero.

The Germans had changed the pattern of defense.

They left the front of the line relatively open, but behind, held in reserve,

was their new idea.

Stormtroopers, waiting to go on the counter-attack, just

as the French foot soldiers were reaching exhaustion.

By the fifth day of Cheman de Nell, the stormtroopers

had inflicted 130,000 casualties on the French.

The French army had already suffered the whole of the Battle of Verdun,

virtually every French soldier at some point had been put through the Millet Verdun.

And then, fairly soon afterwards, Robert Nivell had come up with this

wonderful offensive, the big Nivell offensive, which was going to end the war

in a hurry, which turned out to be an equally costly disaster.

And the French soldiers had just had enough.

French soldiers began to mutiny.

Throughout the region, there is talk of nothing but

mutinies, of troops refusing to relieve their comrades.

It often happens that troops in the lines spend three or four days longer there

because their replacements refused to march.

The French mutiny did not bring violence against

their officers or even a collapse in order.

It was simply that the ordinary soldier was no longer

willing to go on any more sacrificial advances.

Robert Nivell was sacked and replaced by the savior of Verdun, Henri Petter.

Petter was brought in to sort out the mutinies by a combination of strict

discipline, some executions, and also some decent caring for the soldiers,

giving way to some of their demands.

He brought the French army around.

Even so, the French army would launch no major attacks on the Western Front for a

full year, staying mainly on the defensive.

Petter was concerned that the Germans would take advantage of the French

collapse in morale, although inexplicably they failed to detect it.

But it was now only the British who could take up the offensive.

Haig planned a major attack for June at Messine Ridge, a

stretch of high ground which commanded miles of countryside.

He assigned Herbert Plumer, a very modern general, to devise the operation.

Junior officers realized they were being led by someone who really knew his business.

Nothing was left to chance.

We even had a large-scale model covering about an acre,

which represented a scale the woods and the villages beyond.

This latter was a triumph of skill.

He looked like a huge toy village and would have delighted the children.

The Messine Ridge attack combined British, Australian and New Zealand troops.

A potentially devastating weapon.

The mine, laid by tunnelers, would be used on mass for the first time.

The tunnelers have possibly the worst job of all on the Western Front.

Digging these narrow passages under the animal eyes in order to blow them sky high

was a frightening business because you knew the enemy was almost all digging

these narrow passages under the animal eyes in order to blow them sky high was a

frightening business because you knew the enemy

was almost always doing the same thing too.

The ordinary perils of mining under such conditions and with inadequate equipment

would be quite enough for the ordinary man.

But the tunneler had to face the opposition of the enemy as well as nature.

A chance shell on the mouth of the shaft might arrest the flow of precious air or

mean condemnation to an indescribable death in a living tomb.

More exciting if no less unpleasant was the prospect of running into an enemy gallery.

The bravest men have confessed to nervous fears as they have crouched in a dugout

listening to the monotonous tapping of enemy miners below.

So long as the tapping continued there was safety.

It was the occasional silences that were terrifying.

Then the enemy might be charging his mine.

At any moment might come death in its most horrible form.

On the 7th of June 19 mines were ready to prime under Messine Ridge.

Dawn had not yet broken.

The night was very still.

The minute hand on my watch crept on to the fatal moment.

Then out of the silence and the darkness, along the front, 20 mines, some of them

having waited two years or more for this occasion, containing hundreds of tons of

high explosives almost simultaneously and with a roar to wake the dead, burst into

the sky with great sheets of flame developing into

mountainous clouds of dust and earth and trees.

Silhouetted against the flame, I saw huge blocks of earth that seem to be

as big as houses falling back on the ground.

I saw a man flung out from behind the huge block of

the debris silhouetted against the sheet of flame.

Presumably some poor devil of the posh.

It was awful, sort of infirment.

The British retook Messine Ridge and the commanding position it offered.

The explosions were heard as far away as southeast England.

At the end of July 1917, after their success at Messine Ridge, the British

launched the third battle of April, which would lead to passion day.

For 15 days, the German line was pounded.

With horror, you feel that your whole being,

mental and physical, has lost all meaning.

After all, the lump of metals that would crush you to

a shapeless nothing may have started on its course.

The British went over the top on the 31st of July.

If only you could be here tonight, how you would enjoy it.

All together it should be great fun, as long as it doesn't rain.

But it did rain.

These were some of the most appalling conditions that

soldiers had to fight in during the First World War.

And historians have endlessly debated whether Haig

was right to carry on fighting under these conditions.

I suspect it's a case of Haig being damned if he did and damned if he didn't.

They must have been stuck in the mud, become exhausted, and fall and face forward.

Our boys are having a terrible time in the trenches, up to the waste in mud,

just like a ditch full of water.

They're dead orcers, men, cars, motorlories in the hundreds.

It is death the goth the road as the mud is so deep.

The sun was bad enough, but this is a thousand times worse.

By the night of the birthday, I was able to trenches for the pastel.

The gerbils and pastel were higher up than us.

They could look down on us.

And there was a three day barrage of the trenches.

They blew up all the hell.

And whether yorks and lags went over, expected just a few Germans there,

and were going to take pressure down.

The gerbils came out both of their doucos, coupled with machine guns, woof,

and were called.

The attack was called off.

It was a disaster.

Poor little shorty.

He used to tell me about his young lady, his

hilda, about his home he had already bought.

And when he got home, he would get married and

come over to see me and introduce her to you.

How he loved his hilda.

But unfortunately, he'll never see her again.

Poor fellow.

He would give me half of everything he had.

It's a lovely thing his friendship out here.

Please, God, it went be long before this war's over.

We're pushing old for it's back.

I don't think he'll stand the British boys much

longer, and then we'll try and keep a nice home.

I'll know the value of one now.

Good night, love.

God bless you and my children.

And may he soon send me back to those I love.

Is the wish of your faithful husband, Jack?

Jack Mutt died four days later.

For some soldiers, the killing had gone on too long.

As that German came towards me, and I can't kill him.

I must kill him.

I can remember when I joined the army.

I swore I would serve my kicking country.

And my son, me and another, I flashed by my... where bosses came down off both sides.

A six-command he brought down.

Oh, shall not kill.

And I can't kill him.

I had about five seconds to make my ways up.

I shot him above the ankle, and above the knee.

And I brought him down.

I didn't kill him.

Just 41 square miles were captured in 15 weeks.

Each square mile costs some 10,000 casualties.

But the British had also taken a huge toll of Germans.

At the end of the Battle of Pashondale, in the first week of November 1917,

I think any observer could have been forgiven for thinking that both sides were

played out, that they had nothing left to give.

But there was a twist.

A new weapon the Allies had been experimenting with for a year.

The tank.

Within a fortnight of the end of Pashondale, the tank

brought a dazzling victory at the Battle of Compri.

The British used tanks on a large scale for the first time, and just as

importantly, they used predicted artillery fire.

So what this means is that they were able to start firing without firing a few shots

to begin with to find out where the shells would

land, and thus they were able to achieve surprise.

There was no preliminary bombardment to warn the Germans of their danger.

The enemy infantry panicked and fled from the massive war machines, or streamed down

the slopes towards the British line to surrender.

We watched the scene.

Fascinated.

Our tanks were now advancing.

There they were, lumbering along, picking their way through the honeycomb

shell holes and craters, sometimes defeated, but generally in the end,

winning their way through this area of devastation.

Tonight, I'm a sleep and dream of you where a Bosch

officer never dreamt of the trouble awaiting a door.

Think of the hundreds of tanks.

Think of the hundreds of guns.

All got up quietly and secretly.

I can't get over the wonder of it.

11,000 Germans were taken prisoner.

Combry was a complete success.

Church bells were rung all over England in celebration.

But to many soldiers at the front, it seemed an isolated victory.

Though British morale would never break, it was at its lowest point.

The war is getting more and more desperate.

On every hand, one sees unrest and dissatisfaction rampant,

and nothing sensible done to ameliorate grievances.

A more miserable existence will be hard to imagine.

There's nothing but unrest and uncertainty, and

everyone here is absolutely fed up to the truth.

The war on the western front hung in the balance.