"Congratulations!" The exclamation was passed back and forth as we met other officers on our way to brigade headquarters in a dugout on the hillside, where Howell's felicitations to the happy brigadier on the way that his men had gone in were followed by suggestions and a discussion about future plans, which I left to them while I had a look through the brigadier's telescope at Thiepval Ridge under the patterns of shell fire of average days, which proved that the Germans were making no attempt at a counter-attack to recover lost ground. I imagined that the German staff was dumfounded to hear that their redoubtable old first line could possibly have been taken with so little fireworks.
It was when I came to the guns on our return that I felt an awe which I wanted to translate into appreciation. They were firing slowly now or not firing at all, and the idle gunners were lounging about. They had not seen their own curtain of fire or the infantry charge; they had been as detached from the action as the crew of a battleship turret. It was their accuracy and their coördination with the infantry and the infantry's coördination with the barrage that had expressed better than volumes of reports the possibilities of the offensive with waves of men advancing behind waves of shell fire, which was applied in the taking of Douaumont later and must be the solution of the problem of a decision on the Western front.
Above the communication trenches the steel helmets of the British and the gray fatigue caps of German prisoners were bobbing toward the rear and at the casualty clearing station the doctor said, "Very light!" in answer to the question about losses. The prisoners were in unusually good fettle even for men safe out of shell fire; many had no chalk on their clothes to indicate a struggle. They had been sitting in their dugouts and walked out when an Englishman appeared at the door. Yes, they said that they had been caught just before relief, and the relief had been carried out in an unexpected fashion. If they must be taken they, too, liked the patent barrage.
"I'll let you know when there's to be another show," said Howell, as we parted at corps headquarters; but none could ever surpass this one in its success or its opportunity of intimate observation.