Two days later an attack on the left by the 1st and 9th Irish Fusiliers, under a barrage of smoke and shrapnel, advanced the line to the Haagedoorne-Dranoutre Road on a front of upwards of a mile. So great was the surprise and so swift the assault, that the enemy was "smothered," and did not make a serious resistance. Sixty prisoners and eleven machine-guns were taken here. An enemy counter-attack in the evening was brought to a stop by rifle and machine-gun fire, though the 108th Brigade lost one small post. The line was now a thousand yards only from Bailleul, and the defences of the town were pierced. An attack upon the salient would now have resulted in a great German rout. The enemy did not await it. Under the skilful leadership, that was never more apparent than in the months of defeat and humiliation which were to follow, he flitted in a night. The 36th Division, on the morning of August the 30th, was awaiting relief by the 35th Division, to be given a short period of rest and training before being launched upon the great series of final offensives in Flanders. Its right-hand neighbour, the 9th Division, had already been relieved by the 31st Division on the Hoegenacker Ridge, with a like object. That rest the 36th Division was not destined to enjoy. At ten o'clock that morning came a report from the 31st Division that the enemy was gone from its front, and that its men were entering Bailleul from the south. Before two o'clock patrols of the 36th were in the huge Asylum north of the town, and upon the Neuve Eglise Road. The relief was cancelled and an immediate advance ordered, to be carried out by the 109th Brigade. This was not the first enemy retirement in the Western theatre. There had been that of 1917, in which some of the troops now in the 36th Division had been the pursuers. No doubt the men who had then tracked the retreating Germans had felt elation. But that had been false dawn. Now, as men sprang up eagerly to set about their preparations, a conviction spread among them that this was the true, that not again would they have to turn back. Some of our present-day pessimists pretend that by the summer of 1918 the horror, the iron ruthlessness, of the war had robbed men of their stores of latent enthusiasm, and that, even for victory, they had none to summon forth. It is untrue. Were it true, they could not have so swiftly prevailed against an enemy, disheartened indeed, but still disciplined, tenacious and well led, still admirably equipped, and, above all, backed by a series of defences such as the Allies, in their days of adversity, had never dreamed of. All testimony, moreover, is to the contrary. Like a flame the spirit of victory, the bright-hued prospect of deliverance, spread among all ranks. Defeat and retirement had bred melancholy and bad temper. The new atmosphere dissipated them. To go forward, to strike, to make an end--those were the impulses and the hopes that swept through the waiting ranks.