TERRIFIC DRUM-FIRE

The German High Command has ordered up every available battery from other positions, and behind the German lines the reads must have been choked day and night by guns and limbers on the march to the country round Cambrai, straining every nerve of horse and man to get to their new sectors in time to remedy the great disaster. They have come up now, and yesterday I saw some very deadly barrage fire below Inchy and Moeuvres and south of Bourlon, as proof of their arrival. “They have been damn quick in getting on to the ground,” said some of our gunners, and they spoke with a queer kind of admiration as good sportsmen. So it was hot against a weak enemy and no longer with the first great gift of surprise that our men attacked Bourlon Wood yesterday and carried their battle line forward below Inchy and Moeuvres and made a new assault upon Fontaine-notre-dame, where Highlanders had fought forwards and backwards through now-burning streets, though many houses still give cover to machine-gunners, snipers and German infantry. On Friday morning, the battle opened on all sides of the Forest of Bourlon. It was an attack in which all arms worked together in a spectacular and splendid union. Our guns opened a terrific drumfire, and it was the greatest demonstration so far in this battle of all those batteries which had been hidden before the great surprise, of all those field guns which, after the first advance, had galloped far forward over the captured ground, and taken up new positions astoundingly close to the enemy’s line of retreat, of all those heavy and light batteries which I had seen streaming up through day and night, as they wound over the hillsides, surging in a wild turmoil of horses and mules and guns and wagons in ruined villages behind the lines, and getting into action a few minutes after the journey’s end. Many of them had fought on the battlefields in this year of terrible fighting. For months they had had but little rest and no kind of peace, and had lived in shellfire until they were haggard, worn and weary. But now they came to these new battlefields with as much enthusiasm as if they were going into action for the first time, because of the new promise of victory, and they did not spare an ounce of their strength. They were the first to start the battle of Bourlon Wood. But the first to advance were the tanks – more than two score of them, with single scouts ahead followed by others in echelon formation. Many of them had already been fighting since Tuesday morning; all of them had been working day and night for many days before that.