In that spirit, as far as I, an outsider could see and hear, did our battalions of boys march forward to “The Great Push,” whistling, singing, jesting, until their lips were dry and their throats parched in the dust, and even the merriest jesters of all were silent under the weight of their packs and rifles. So they moved up day by day, through the beauty of that June in France, thousands of men, hundreds of thousands to the edge of the battlefields of the Somme, where the enemy was intrenched in fortress positions and where already, before the last days of June, gunfire was flaming over a vast sweep of country.