Page:The Irish guards in the great war (Volume 1).djvu/362

 specially the strikes of past years had to be paid for, and the giant bombing-planes that should have taught fear and decency far inside the German frontiers were not ready.

A straight drive from the west on to the German lateral communications promised the quickest return. It was laid in the hands of the First, Third, and Fifth Armies to send that attack home, and with the French and American pressure from the south, break up the machine past repair.

Men, to-day, say and believe that they knew it would be the last battle of the war, but, at the time, opinions varied; and the expectations of the rank and file were modest. The thing had gone on so long that it seemed the order of life; and, though the enemy everywhere fell back, yet he had done so once before, and over very much the same semi-liquid muck as we were floundering in that autumn's end. "The better the news, the worse the chance of a knock," argued the veterans, while the young hands sent out with high assurance, at draft-parades, that the war was on its last legs, discovered how the machine-gun-fenced rear of retirements was no route-march. ("There was them that came from Warley shouting, ye'll understand; and there was them that came saying nothing at all, and liking it no more than that; but I do not remember any one of us looked to be out of it inside six months. No—not even when we was dancing into Maubeuge. We thought Jerry wanted to get his wind.")

On the 4th November, one week before the end, twenty-six British divisions moved forward on a thirty-mile front from Oisy to north of Valenciennes, the whole strength of all their artillery behind them.

The Guards' position had been slightly shifted. Instead of working south of Le Quesnoy, the Division was put in a little north of the town, on the banks of the river Rhônelle, between the Sixty-second Division on their right and the Forty-second on their left. The Battalion had marched from St. Hilaire, in the usual small fine rain, on the 2nd November to billets in Ber