oken on
the Allies.

Bourlon Wood--famous name!--fades behind us. A few rubbish heaps
beside the road tell of former farms and factories. The car descends a
long slope, and then, suddenly, before us runs the great dry trough of
the Canal du Nord; in front, a ruined bridge, with a temporary one
beside it, a ruined lock on the left, and rising ground beyond. We
cross the bridge, mount a short way on the western slope, then in the
darkening afternoon we walk along the front trench of the Hindenburg
line, north and south of the road--a superb trench, the finest I have
yet seen, dug right down into the rock, with concrete headquarters,
dressing and signal stations, machine-gun emplacements and observation
posts; and, in front of it, great fields of wire, through which wide
lanes have been flattened down. Now we have turned eastward, and we
stand and gaze towards Cambrai, over the road we have come. The huge
trench is before us, the waterless canal with its steep banks lies
beyond, and on the further hill-side, trench beyond trench, as far as
the eye can see, the lines still fairly clear, though in some places
broken up and confused by bombardment. The officer beside me draws my
attention to some marks on the ground near me--the track marks of two
tanks as plain almost as when they were made. One of them, after
flattening a wide passage through the wire fields for the advance of
the infantry, had clambered across the trench. At our feet were the
grooved marks of the descent, and we could follow them through the
incredible rise on the further side; after which the protected
monster--of much lighter build, however, than his predecessors on the
Somme--seemed to have run north and south along the trench, silencing
the deadly patter of the machine guns; while its fellow on the west
side, according to its tracks at least, had also turned south, for the
same purpose.

The Hindenburg line!--and the two tanks! The combination, indeed,
suggests the whole story of that final campaign in which the British
Army, as the leading unit in a combination of armies brilliantly led
by a French Generalissimo whom all trusted, brought down the military
power of Germany. There were some six weeks of fighting after the
capture of the Hindenburg line; but it was that capture--"the essential
part" of the whole campaign, to use Marshal Haig's words--to which
everything else was subordinate, which, in truth, decided the struggle.
And the tanks are the