Before I reached G.H.Q., Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had already
reported the recapture or surrender of eleven villages on the Ancre
during February, including Serre and Gommecourt, which had defied our
efforts in the summer of 1916. That is to say, after three months of
trench routine and trench endurance imposed by a winter which seemed to
have let loose every possible misery of cold and wet, of storm and
darkness, on the fighting hosts in France, the battle of the Somme had
moved steadily forward again from the point it had reached in November.
Only, when the curtain rose on the new scene it was found that during
these three months strange things had been happening.
About the middle of November, after General Gough's brilliant strokes on
the Ancre, which gave us St. Pierre Divion, Beaucourt, and Beaumont
Hamel, and took us up to the outskirts of Grandcourt, the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_ wrote--"For us Germans the days of the crisis on the Somme are
over. Let the French and English go on sacrificing the youth of their
countries here.
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