By the 26th March the tongue of the advancing tide had licked past Noyon and Roye and, next day, had encircled Montdidier. Meantime, our old Somme base on the Ancre, whence the great fights were fed and supplied from the hundred camps and dumps round Méaulte, and the railway-sidings between Albert and Amiens, had passed into the enemy’s hands. To all human appearance, the whole of our bitter year’s effort was abolished, as though it had never been. The enemy had prepared, brought together, and struck at the time that best suited himself, with seventy-three divisions against thirty-seven British divisions, and the outcome was appalling defeat of our arms. It would thus seem that no amount of inspiring statesmanship at home, or anxious readjustment of divisions at the front, will make troops where troops are not. Therefore the battalions and batteries in the full blast of the onset perished or were taken prisoners; and of the stores captured or destroyed, lest they should benefit the enemy, we may look to receive no account. Not the least depressing of the sights that adorned the landscapes were the dumps lit by our own hands, flaring to heaven when, as turned out afterwards, there was really no need. Divisions were being raced up to reinforce the fluid front as fast as might be, but no one knew for certain when or where they would arrive, and Camp Commandants acted on their own judgments. The battalions in the line swayed to conflicting storms of orders. “STANDING-TO” On the 25th, being still at Boisleux-St. Marc, the 1st Irish Guards were detailed to relieve “several different units,” but more specially the 1st Coldstream just east of Hamelincourt then practically in possession of the enemy. (One found out where the enemy were by seeing them come over the brows of unexpected slopes in small groups that thinned out and settled down to machine-gunning under cover of equally unexpected field-guns.) They spent the whole day being “hit and held” in this fashion, and, close on midnight, got definite instructions not to wait for any relief but to go off to the sugar-factory near Boyelles, which they did, and bestowed themselves in huts in the neighbourhood, and there were hotly shelled during the night. The German attack was well home on that sector now, and the German infantry might be looked for at any moment. They removed from those unhealthy huts to an old trench next morning, where their first set of orders was to relieve the 1st Scots Guards. (Order, provisional, definite and cancelled all in two hours and a half!) Later came orders--equally definite, equally washed out later--to relieve the 2nd Coldstream in another sector, and finally just before midnight they relieved the 1st Scots Guards after all. That battalion had been in the army line between St. Léger and Hénin, but the enemy’s advance had forced it back in the direction of Boisleux-St. Marc near the Arras-Albert railway-line. The Battalion found it a