Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/287

 But in the area that we held lay a sample of the great Hindenburg Line with its support-systems, its ten-foot-deep concreted and camouflaged trenches, covered gun-ways, machine-gun wells and shafts, and the whole detail of its immensely advertised impregnability. Men saw it with their own eyes, explored its recesses wonderingly, followed down the terrible lanes that the tanks had cut in its hundred-yard-deep beltings of wire, and settled themselves thankfully in its secure dug-outs, not foreseeing the days next spring when they would be swept out of it all like withered leaves. Cambrai was no success, but it would be unjust to hold it, as some wearied and over-wrought souls did, an unrelieved failure. The enemy had not achieved their purpose, which was to cut off all our troops in the salient, and were quite willing to break away and wait till the transfer of fresh divisions from the collapsed Russian front should be methodically completed. We, on our part, were equally ready to cut our losses, for we had no men to spare. The Guards Division was moved out of the battle-area on the 6th December, being relieved by troops of the Ninth Division. On the evening of their own private battle the Battalion handed over their none too pleasant trenches to the 5th Cameron Highlanders, and went back to bivouac in Gouzeaucourt Wood after a "very good relief," which drew from the Diary the tribute that the Camerons were a "fine Battalion." Had they been an hour late, in that cutting wind across the slopes, a cohort of angels with fiery swords would have been put down as hopeless!

They moved from the Wood next day to Etricourt down the long road through Fins, and at Etricourt entrained for Beaumetz-les-Loges on the Arras-Doullens road which they reached late at night, cold and empty, and were not billeted at Berneville, two or three kilometres to the north-east, till midnight. They had lost, in November and December, two officers killed; Lieutenant N. F. Durant on the 30th November, who had joined on the 1st of that month, and 2nd Lieutenant T. A. Carey, killed on the 5th Decem