This relief was begun about noon with the aid of a heavy barrage from our artillery, of which nobody in the line knew the exact reason. The reason was that Brigade had ordered another attack which was originally scheduled for 11:15. Merle-Smith had protested that we had only one battalion left and that it was unwise to use up our last effectives. The only result was that the barrage was extended until noon, on Colonel Mitchell’s report that it would be impossible to get the orders forward to the front by 11:15. He sent the order in three different directions, but none of his messages arrived until the barrage which was to cover the attack had passed over and the relief of the 1st battalion had already begun. The situation was a stalemate. We had made an advance of three kilometers under desperate conditions, but in spite of our losses and sacrifices we had failed to take our final objective. Well, success is not always the reward of courage. There is no military organization, no matter how famous, that has not its record of failures. In this war every regiment and division in the older armies has known times when it was impossible for them to do all that it was hoped they might be able to accomplish, and most especially when they were called upon to capture well defended trench positions. Indeed, since 1915, no commanders in the older armies would dream of opposing to strongly wired and entrenched positions the naked breasts of their infantry. They take care that the wire, or part of it at least, is knocked down by artillery or laid flat by tanks before they ask unprotected riflemen to try conclusions with its defenders. When the wire is deep, and still intact, and strongly defended, the infantry can do little but hang their heroic bodies on it. But we shall not dwell on this. The most glorious day in the history of our regiment in the Civil War was Fredericksburg, where the Old 69th in the Irish Brigade failed to capture the impregnable position on Marye’s Heights, though their dead with the green sprigs in their caps lay in rows before it. Landres et St. Georges is our Fredericksburg and the Kriemhilde Stellung our Marye’s Heights.