Almost everything that Haig and Rawlinson expected of the enormous artillery effort they had prepared was not to occur. The German position, for one thing, was far stronger than British intelligence had estimated. The thirty-foot dugouts in which the German front-line garrison sheltered were almost impervious to any shell the British could fire and had survived intact right up to the last days before the attack. A trench raid launched on the night of 26/27 June revealed, for example, that “the dugouts are still good. The [Germans] appear to remain in these dugouts all the time and are
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