The weather today has been of the vilest, and it is well we made our attack yesterday. Since last evening it has rained pitilessly, so that the ground is everywhere dissolving, and it is impossible to see even a hundred yards. Rain had fallen the night before the attack, and the air when the assault was made was full of mist. One result has been that the battle has been fought practically without any aerial observation, a fact which should have been in the enemy’s favour, because we had driven him, for the time being, from the air. It might have been a serious deprivation for us, but we showed ourselves able to get along without it. Some of our men felt their way in the murk over the enemy’s lines, and there, emerging from the clouds just overhead, used their machine-guns on troops in the trenches. As a whole, however, the battle was fought without aeroplane assistance, though the help that the airmen had given in the days before the attack cannot be overestimated.
It was, of course, largely by their aid that our artillery was able to do what it did. Our infantry is loud in their praise. Not only was the timing of our barrage almost everywhere perfect, so that our men could go behind it as behind a protecting wall, but the destruction of enemy trenches and gun positions was extraordinary.
Much of the ground fought over yesterday was even worse ploughed up than the incredible chaos of the Somme battlefields, and there are woods through which we found progress difficult because the heaped debris made it almost impossible for a man on foot to force his way through.
The favourite type of German stronghold is a structure of concrete made all in one piece, and not built of blocks, which has been nicknamed “the German pill-box”. Used singly they are merely shelters or substitutes for dug-outs. With the proper internal arrangements and loopholes they are machine-gun posts, or clustered together they make redoubts. They are not easily destroyed by shell fire, but so terrific was our bombardment that, where they were not shattered, they were thrown upon their sides or left ridiculously standing on their roofs. Some are big enough to hold 20 or 30 men, and there is every evidence, olfactory and other, that in not a few cases the garrisons are still inside.
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