The reader must strive to imagine the emotions of the men who waited in the dark for the fateful moment. Some, the luckier ones, those of the battalions and attached troops that were to take the Blue Line, had but another forty minutes, though those forty minutes must have seemed long enough. The battalions which were to pass through them on that objective had two hours after that. It was eleven months since the Division had made its first great attack. Despite its heavy losses on that day and since, there was here a large proportion of officers and men who had taken part in it, including many who had then been wounded. They must have recalled, as they waited for the crash of opening artillery, with what high hopes they had gone forward on the banks of the Ancre. The task must have appeared to them almost equally formidable to-day. And yet there was a general feeling of confidence, and confidence not unreasoned. The British Army had learnt much since then, and the men in the line realized the growth of that knowledge and had their part in it. They had watched the stage prepared for the triumphant _dénouement_, prepared with matchless industry and forethought, and they were ready to play their part fitly when the curtain rose. There was among the men, it may be, less of that spirit of gay, generous, headlong valour, ready to spill itself without a thought of the cost, but there was a greater store of the soldier's craft; the craft which seeks to save itself that it may inflict the more loss upon the opponent. In fighting efficiency the Division, war-tried, but not war-weary, was probably, in the small hours of that June morning, at the highest pitch it ever attained. Zero was at 3-10 a.m. It had been fixed, after long consultation with Divisions, by the Army as the hour at which men should be able to see just one hundred yards ahead. In the conferences after the battle the general opinion seemed to be that it had been put five or ten minutes too early. It had been arranged that a normal programme of harassing fire should be carried out, as a cessation of this would have appeared suspicious to the enemy. It seemed, nevertheless, to those who watched and waited, that the night was unusually quiet. A few of our howitzers spoke now and again, and from the German lines came regularly the hiccoughing double thud of their great gun, followed by the whine of its missile overhead, on its course to some objective as far back as Hazebrouck.