message over a telephone wire--and how
much may depend on it!"

"Yet thanks to intelligent and devoted work, to experience and
resource, how little in these later stages of the war has gone wrong!"

The fighting men, the Staff work, the auxiliary services of the
British Army--the long welding of war had indeed brought them by last
autumn to a wonderful efficiency. And that efficiency was never so
sharply tested as by the exchange of a stationary war for a war of
movement. The Army swept on "over new but largely devastated country,"
into unknown land, where all the problems, as compared with the long
years of trench war, were new. Yet nothing failed--"except the
astounded enemy's power of resistance."

So much from a first-hand record of the First Army's advance. It
carries me back as I summarise it to my too brief stay at
Valenciennes, and the conversations of the evening with the Army
Commander and several members of his Staff. The talk turned largely on
this point of training, Staff work, and general efficiency. There was
no boasting whatever; but one read the pride of gallant and devoted
men in the forces they had commanded. "Then we have not muddled
through?" I said, laughing, to the Army Commander. Sir Henry smiled.
"No, indeed, we have _not_ muddled through!"

And the results of this efficiency were soon seen. Take first the
attack of the First and Third Armies on this section. North of
Moeuvres the Canadians, under General Home, crossing the Canal in the
early morning of September 27th, on a narrow front, and spreading out
behind the German troops holding the Canal, by a fan-shaped manoeuvre,
brilliantly executed, which won reluctant praise from captured German
officers, pushed on for Bourlon and Cambrai. The 11th Division,
following close behind, turned northward, with our barrage from the
heavy guns, far to the west, protecting their left flank, towards the
enemy line along the Sensee, taking ground and villages as they went.
Meanwhile the front German line, pinned between our barrage behind
them and the Canal, taken in front and rear, and attacked by the 56th
Division, had nothing to do but surrender.

"The day's results," says my informant of the First Army, "were the
great Hindenburg system (in this northern section) finally broken, the
height before Cambrai captured, thousands of prisoners and great
quantities of guns taken, and our line at its furthest point 7,000
yards nearer Germany. A great triump