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bombardment the British army had ever experienced; the writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf could hear it at their Sussex home across the English Channel. An unprecedented concentration of heavy German artillery poured out more than a million shells in a mere five hours—compared to the British taking nearly a week to fire one and a half million before the attack on the Somme. "At half-past four in the morning," recalled one British officer, "I thought the world was coming to an end." The intensity of the barrage rendered some soldiers helpless. "The first to be affected were the young ones who'd just come out," remembered a veteran of this night. "They would go to one of the older ones—older in service that is—and maybe even cuddle up to him and start crying."

The attack came at a bad time, for Haig's troops were in the midst of a complicated reorganization that involved reducing the number of battalions in each division. The German blow also struck at a vulnerable point: spreading their forces thinner, the British had just extended their sector of the front, taking over from the French about 25 miles of trenches, some of them poorly constructed—and with supply roads leading to Paris, not to British bases. Finally, most of the terrible loss of British blood in 1915, 1916, and 1917 had been during British offensives, and after three years without experiencing a major German assault, Haig was overconfident and his defensive positions not as strong as they could have been. Despite information that some kind of attack was coming, he had just granted leave to 88,000 troops.

On the German side, four factors made the attack formidable, only three of which the generals themselves had planned on. The first was surprise: the Germans kept their ammunition dumps covered so they couldn't be seen from the air; assault troops were moved up to the front at night; and, unlike the British offensive at Passchendaele, this one was not preceded by a two-week bombardment that gave ample advance notice. All the artillery fire was packed into those five hours. Second, that fire was staggering: the Germans had quietly maneuvered into position more than 6,400 guns and 3,500 mortars, whose barrage combined high explosives with shells containing poison gas. Mixed with the latter was quick-acting tear gas, which tempted many an unwary British soldier to take off his gas mask and rub his streaming eyes, only to then breathe in the gas that would hours later kill or disable him. Third, the Germans were fighting differently, having put 56 divisions through a rigorous three-week retraining program. Instead of tens of thousands of troops forming an easy target by advancing in plain view in a line abreast across miles of front, men were divided into groups of seven to ten "storm troopers," under officers making decisions on the spot, not following a schedule laid down by generals in the rear. The groups darted forward, using gullies or other natural cover, aiming to slip between British machine-gun posts and overwhelm artillerymen in the rear, who thought themselves out of range of any infantry attack.

That they could succeed so well in this task was due to a fourth factor, the fortuitous assistance of nature. Dense, low-lying fog cloaked the battlefield until midday, allowing the storm trooper teams to reach and cross British front-line trenches while largely unseen by machine-gunners who otherwise would have decimated them. Already dazed by the artillery barrage, most British troops didn't see the Germans until they were close enough to throw hand grenades into British trenches. The Germans had found the most imaginative new tactics yet seen in trench warfare, and they worked. The British trenches rang with panicked cries of "Jerry's through!" By the day's end the Germans had captured more than 98 square miles of ground, and the British were evacuating another 40. Losses of position on this scale had not happened since the rival armies had dug in more than three years earlier.

The Germans knew they had to break one army, the French or the British, and