Within ten days the Canadian contribution to the Allied offensive in the Amiens sector was completed. On August 22, the decision was reached by the high command to shift the whole Canadian force north to Arras in preparation for the attack upon the Drocourt-Queant position; in the early hours of August 26—less than 100 hours later—the Canadians burst through the early morning mist upon the astonished Germans, who thought them fifty miles away, and wrested the high ground at Monchy le Preux and the positions in alignment with it from them. From this jumping-off place the Canadians advanced resolutely and steadily towards Cambrai; in a week’s time the much vaunted Hindenburg line was behind them; towards the end of September, upon the very morning upon which the Germans planned the recovery of lost ground the Canadians forestalled them, pushed across the Canal du Nord and enveloped Bourlon Wood where the British advance a year earlier had been stayed; then driving forward across the Arras-Cambrai highway they put in jeopardy the German control of Cambrai, the pivot upon which the whole western German defence swung. There followed the desperate attempt by the Germans to save Cambrai by the recapture of Bourlon Wood; their failure involved the evacuation of the city and the undermining of the defensive lines to the south. At Cambrai the Canadians passed the crest of the hill—thereafter the "going" was rapid and comparatively easy to a goal already in sight. The capture of Valenciennes was an interesting incident in a widespread advance by the whole Allied front from the Meuse to the sea; and the last day of the war found the Canadians as the advance guard of the British forces victoriously encamped upon the very ground where in August, 1914, the Old Contemptibles—that immortal vanished army—first threw the British sword into the rapidly-rising scale in a determination, amply vindicated by legions animated by their example and inspired by their achievements who followed them, to right the balance. This completion of the full circle of British sacrifice in the last hours of the war by the troops of an overseas Dominion which, when the first shots were fired, had no military history and dreamed not of its aptitude for war is one of those profound historic coincidences which make an appeal, to be felt rather than expressed, to that sense of Destiny which in times of Fate takes possession of the human soul. *CHAPTER VI* *THE CIVILIAN AS WARRIOR*