The hill was surmounted and the machine-guns taken. Afterwards the advance was continued for five miles, over a country covered with dead Germans and horses, and blazing homesteads. The Irish rested for a time in a field, and then pushed on again until they reached the banks of the Marne. They captured 600 Germans, including many officers and eight machine-guns. But if the advance was swift, sure, and triumphant a bitter price had to be paid for it, as is the way of war, for many a fine and stalwart Irish youth found his grave between the rivers. The man who produced the green flag was Corporal J.J. Cunningham from Dublin. He bought it in London before the Irish Guards left for the Front. It became a prized possession of the regiment. "You may be surprised to hear that the Irish flag I bought from the pedlar before parting with you I have still got," Cunningham, who was made a sergeant, says in a letter to a friend in London. "It has been carried through all our engagements, and with God's help I will carry it back to England. Clay from the trenches has made the harp on it very dirty, but, thank God, that is the only disgrace it has suffered. I did not think when we were buying it that it would go through so much." I am told, indeed, that in a far later stage of the war, at another critical moment, it was flourished by the Earl of Cavan, an Irishman, then in command of the Guards' Brigade, to egg on the Irish to an enterprise before which other units had excusably quailed. He knew of the episode between the Marne and the Aisne. He had probably heard also a story of the American Civil War. An Irish regiment on the side of the North carried a green flag bearing a harp in the glow of a sunburst, and so noted were they for their wild and reckless daring that a Confederate general, seeing the dreaded colour surging forwards, and borne proudly aloft through the battle smoke and the hail of bullets, cried out to his men, "Steady, boys, steady. Here's that infernal green flag again." The Germans, on the day that Lord Cavan waved the improvised flag of the Irish Guards had reason also to curse it if they but knew--for the loss of valuable trenches.