* * * * * A British airplane fell in No Man’s Land. Winterbourne saw the pilot, who was still alive, struggle to get out from the wreckage. An enemy machine-gun was turned on him, and he fell limp across the side of the cock-pit. The plane was smashed to pieces by British heavies to prevent the Germans from obtaining the model. * * * * * They shifted to another part of the line. The Company was out in No Man’s Land in the darkness strengthening their shattered wire against a threatened attack. Suddenly from half a mile of German front leaped a line of flame. There was a whistling roar of projectiles, and a thousand gas containers crashed to the ground all about them. Men were killed outright by direct hits, and wounded by pieces of flying metal. Every man who took more than two breaths of the deadly concentration was doomed. All that night and far into the misty dawn the stretchers went down the communication trench carrying inert figures with horrible foam on their mouths. * * * * * The German attacks spent their force, and the huge Allied counter-attacks began. The starving German armies were hurled back to the Hindenburg Line, their impregnable defence. The Canadians miraculously stormed the Drocourt-Quéant switch line. Winterbourne was back on the Somme, that incredible desert, pursuing the retreating enemy. They came up the Bapaume-Cambrai road by night, and bivouacked in holes scratched with entrenching tools in the side of a sandy bank. The wrecked country-side in the pale moonlight was a frigid and motionless image of Death. They spoke in whispers, awed by the immensity of desolation. By day the whole landscape was covered with the débris left by the broken German armies. Smashed tanks, guns with their wheels broken, stood out like fixed wrecks in the unmoving ocean of shell-holes. The whole earth seemed a litter of overcoats, shaggy leather packs, rifles, water-bottles, gas masks, steel helmets, bombs, entrenching tools, cast away in the panic of flight. By night, the sky glowed with the flames of burning Cambrai, with the black hump of Bourlon Hill silhouetted against them. They drove the Germans from Cambrai, and pressed on from village to village, constantly shelled and harassed by machine-gun fire from their rear-guard. The German machine-gunners, fragments of the magnificent armies of the early War years, died at their posts. The demoralized German Infantry surrendered wholesale.