movement from a northerly direction.
Therefore, they were forced to do something, without further delay,
which resulted in a swift retirement on to the Hindenburg line some
six miles to the rear.

It was a most interesting and instructive chase, and the enemy
retreated so fast that it was with the greatest difficulty that we
could keep up and maintain contact with him. The battery had
reluctantly to abandon a captured German field gun which had been
doing valiant work as the seventh gun for several days against its
late owners, for we had neither time or the means to convey (p. 086)
surplus equipment along with us. It was the kind of day that one reads
about in "Field Artillery Training" or even endeavours to imitate
while manoeuvring out in rest, but for the first time we were doing
it in reality. The battery dropped into action on innumerable
occasions during the course of the day, and had only time to fire a
few rounds before the enemy had decamped out of range. Then we would
limber up with all speed, the teams waiting the orthodox two hundred
yards in rear and to the flank, and gallop forward and take up a new
position right out in the open, and help the enemy on his way with a
few reminders that we were up and after him, and that he would do well
to hurry.

By evening our foes had snugly entrenched themselves behind the great
Hindenburg barrier, and we again came face to fare with this
formidable obstacle. The line had, meanwhile, been kept in an
excellent state of preservation, and it was quite out of the question
to make a frontal attack on it without first cutting the belts of
broad wire and treating the emplacements to a prolonged bombardment.
Another formidable hindrance in our way and placed between us,
moreover, was the famous Canal Du Nord, which was entirely dry in most
places. It was a considerable breadth across, and could obviously not
be bridged as long as the enemy kept watch over it from the opposite
side, and it varied from forty to seventy feet in depth. Thus, for the
time being, the line settled down stationary until this task could be
accomplished, for it was not the intention of our Command that we
should sit down for the winter before this great fortress, as our
enemies wished and expected us to do.

Our opponents were too busily engaged removing their heavy pieces of
Artillery back to a place of safety to subject us to a great amount of
annoyance, and, as the weather remained good,