One might have supposed it impossible for the Colonel to have found a single favourable condition about the coming fight. His battalion had withered away to little more than half its strength; that remaining half was almost completely worn out with want of sleep, with constant cruel fighting, with forced marching; had scarcely been brought out of the water-logged trenches to rest before being marched up into them again, had the prospect before them now of a desperate fight against enormous odds with no cover but the inadequate scratches that in those days passed for trenches, and with even these battered and smashed by shell fire, swimming in water and liquid mud. It might even be difficult to understand any reason for his ‘Well, thank Heaven the orders are plain and simple enough this time,’ since those orders were ‘to hold the position _at all costs_ until relieved,’ the words ‘at all costs’ being heavily underlined, if one had not known the nightmare uncertainty that in the Retreat-Advance days worried the harassed commanding officers to a point of distraction. Usually the orders were full of instructions to do this if the Germans retired, to do that if they advanced in strength, to do something else if they attacked any one of a dozen points; to conform to the movements of a certain regiment, to support the advance or cover the retirement of another or another—to have, in fact, enough possibilities to consider and act promptly upon to have kept a dozen heads and a hundred eyes very fully occupied; and all, of course, in addition to the C.O.’s own paramount job of fighting his battalion. So that after all there was some cause for his relief at the simplicity of the orders which this time bade him hold on ‘at all costs,’ even although it might well be that those orders were the death-warrant of himself and most of his remaining men. He had no doubts as to the nature of the struggle close ahead; indeed there was so little of a secret about it that every officer and man of the battalion was fully aware that the Germans had determined on an attack which was to break through the thin British line. There was to be no manœuvring, no feinting here and striking there, no cunning tactics about this attack. The Germans were going to strike straight and hard and heavy, and burst through by sheer hard fighting and weight of numbers—‘Leastways,’ as the brigade signaller put it in passing on this cheerful intelligence to the battalion signallers, ‘that’s what they think they’re goin’ to do.’ ‘I like their bloomin’ cheek,’ said the signaller who took the message. ‘I wonder what they fancy we’ll be doin’ while they break through.’ The fact that a weak battalion of British infantry should consider itself fit to stem the advance of ten times their number of picked German troops did not appear to strike him in any way as being a piece of equally ‘bloomin’ cheek.’