in reasonably high spirits. It had been a winning action, in spite of trench-work, and men really felt that they had the running in their own hands at last.
Back-area rumours and official notifications were good too. The Nineteenth and Second Corps of the Second Army, together with the Belgian Army, had attacked on the 28th September, from Dixmude to far south of the Ypres-Zonnebeke road; had retaken all the heights to the east of Ypres, and were in a fair way to clear out every German gain there of the past four years. A German withdrawal was beginning from Lens to Armentières, and to the south of the Third Army the Fourth came in on the 29th (while the Battalion was "resting and shaving" in its trench-shelters by Demicourt) on a front of twelve miles, and from Gricourt to Vendhuille broke, and poured across the Hindenburg Line, then to the St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, lest there should be one furlong of the uneasy front neglected, the Fifth and Sixth Corps of the Third Army attacked over the old Gouzeaucourt ground between Vendhuille and Marcoing. This, too, without counting the blows that the French and the Americans were dealing in their own spheres on the Meuse and in the Argonne; each stroke coldly preparing the next.
The Germans had, during September, lost a quarter of a million of prisoners, several thousand guns, and immense quantities of irreplaceable stores. Their main line of resistance was broken and over-run throughout; and their troops in the field were feeling the demoralisation of constant withdrawals, as well as shortage from abandoned supplies. Our people had known the same depression in the March Push, when night skies, lit with burning dumps, gave the impression that all the world was going up in universal surrender.
Towards Maubeuge
But work was still to do. Between Cambrai, which at the end of October was under, though not actually in,
