Heavy shell-fire has been concentrated by enemy batteries on the village of Irles, and he is also barraging with high explosives upon Serre, Miraumont, Grandcourt, and other places from which he has withdrawn. It is probable that he is using up his reserves of ammunition in the dumps along the line of his retirement. Many of his heavy guns still remain on railway mountings behind Bapaume--we are now less than a mile from that town--and they are doing double duty by quick firing. The latest village to fall into our hands is Thilloy, north of Ligny-Thilloy, and just south of Bapaume, and the enemy is now retiring to Loupart Wood, Achiet-le-Petit, and Bucquoy, strongly defended for the time being by a thick belt of wire.
It is enormously interesting to speculate upon this new plan of the German High Command. It is a plan forced upon him by steady pressure of our attacks, which thrust him into bad ground, where the condition of his troops was hideous, but, beyond all, by the fear that our fighting power in the spring might break his armies if they stayed on their old line. Now he is executing with skill, aided by great luck--for the foggy weather is his luck--a manoeuvre designed to shorten his line, thereby increasing his offensive and defensive man-power, and to withdraw in the way that he intends to make it difficult for pursuit, and so to gain time to fall back upon new and stronger lines of defence.
It is difficult to describe the feelings of our men who go forward to these villages and capture them, and settle down in them for a day or two, unless you have gazed at those places for months through narrow slits in underground chambers, and know that it would be easier to go from life to eternity than cross over the enemy's wire into those strongholds while they are inhabited by men with machine-guns.
You cannot imagine the thrill of walking one day into Gommecourt, or Miraumont, or Irles, without resistance, and seeing in close detail the way of life led by the men who have been doing their best to kill you. There is something uncanny in handling the things they handled, in sitting at the tables where they took their meals, in walking about the ruins which our guns made above them. I had this thrill when I walked through Gommecourt--Gommecourt the terrible, and the graveyard of so many brave London boys who fell here on July 1--and up through Gommecourt Park, with its rows of riven trees, to a point beyond, and to a far outpost where a group of soldiers attached to the Sherwood Foresters of the 46th Division, full of spirit and gaiety, in spite of the deadly menace about them, had dragged up a heavy trench-mortar and its monstrous winged shells, which they were firing into a copse 500 yards away where Fritz was holding out. So through the snow I went into Gommecourt down a road pitted with recent shell-holes, and with a young Sherwood Forester who said, "It's best to be quick along this track. It ain't a health resort."