That would have happened this time last year. Fortunately it
can happen no longer. And the British and French are doing very much better than merely hold the Germans while the brave Russians and the Italians march from success to success. They have made progress of substantial strategic importance, if not imposing on a small-scale map by which people are too apt to judge. Our own progress has been north of Bazentin-le-Petit and north-west of Poziaes. We are nearly everywhere at the top of the slope up which we have been moving by alternate rushes and consolida- tions. Only between High Wood and Delville Wood, says the special correspondent of the Times, are the enemy on higher ground than we are. The French have established themselves on the Hem-Maurepas road. Last Saturday on a line from the east of Hardecourt to the Somme opposite Buscourt—a front of about four miles—they advanced to a depth varying from six hundred and sixty to eleven hundred yards and took one thousand prisoners and thirty machine guns.
