war in that part of the line. He
lay stretched outside the railway station into which many shells had
crashed. It was as though he had walked from his own comrades toward our
line before a bullet caught him.

Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German troops, and of how
his men surrendered to single troopers of ours, while whole detachments
gave themselves up to tanks. "Retiring troops," he wrote, "greeted one
particular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh and gallantly
to the attack, with shouts of 'Blacklegs!' and 'War-prolongers!"' That
is true. When the Germans left Bohain they shouted out to the French
girls: "The English are coming. Bravo! The war will soon be over!" On a
day in September, when British troops broke the Drocourt-Queant line,
I saw the Second German Guards coming along in batches, like companies,
and after they had been put in barbed-wire inclosures they laughed
and clapped at the sight of other crowds of comrades coming down as
prisoners. I thought then, "Something has broken in the German spirit."
For the first time the end seemed very near.

Yet the German rear-guards fought stubbornly in many places, especially
in the last battles round Cambrai, where, on the north, the Canadian
corps had to fight desperately, and suffered heavy and bitter losses
under machine-gun fire, while on the south our naval division and others
were badly cut up.

General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was anxious and
disheartened. He was losing more men in machine-gun actions round
Cambrai than in bigger battles. I watched those actions from Bourlon
Wood, saw the last German railway train steam out of the town, and went
into the city early on the morning of its capture, when there was a
roaring fire in the heart of it and the Canadians were routing out the
last Germans from their hiding-places.

The British army could not have gone on much farther after November
11th, when the armistice brought us to a halt. For three months
our troops had fought incessantly, storming many villages strongly
garrisoned with machine-gunners, crossing many canals under heavy fire,
and losing many comrades all along the way. The pace could not have been
kept up. There is a limit even to the valor of British troops, and for a
time we had reached that limit. There were not many divisions who could
have staggered on to new attacks without rest and relief. But they had
broken the German armies against them by a su