Since the 21st August the Guards Division had been well employed. Its 2nd Brigade, with the Second Division on its right, had captured the Ablainzevelle-Moyenneville spur; and the Second Division had taken Courcelles. By the night of the 23rd, when the 3rd Guards Brigade relieved the 2nd, and the Second Division had captured Ervillers on the Arras-Bapaume road, the Guards Division, with their 1st Brigade in support, was within half a mile of St. Léger, and in touch with the Fifty-sixth Division on their left, which was trying to work round the head of the Hindenburg Line and turn in from the north. At this point resistance stiffened. The hilly ground, cut and cross-cut with old trenches and the beginnings of new ones, lent itself to the stopping game of well-placed machine-guns equally from round Croisilles, where the Fifty-sixth Division was engaged; from about St. Léger Wood, where the 3rd Guards Brigade, supported by tanks, was renewing its acquaintance with the German anti-tank-rifle; and from Mory, where the Sixty-second Division was delayed by the Division on its right being held up. An enemy balloon or two hung on the horizon and some inquisitive, low-flying aeroplanes hinted at coming trouble. The line expected as much, but they did not seem so well informed farther back. THE AFFAIR OF ST. LÉGER On the 26th August orders arrived that the 1st Guards Brigade would now take up the running from the 3rd, and advance eastward from St. Léger towards Ecoust till opposition was met. There were, of course, refinements on this idea, but that was the gist of it. The 2nd Grenadiers and the 2nd Coldstream would attack, with the Battalion in support. The men were in their trenches by tea-time on the 26th, No. 1 Company in Jewel Trench just east of the entrance to the little Sensée River valley, and the others disposed along the line of Mory Switch, an old trench now only a foot deep. Battalion Headquarters lay in an abandoned German stores dug-out. Final orders did not arrive till after midnight on the 26th, and there was much to arrange and link up between then and seven o’clock, barrage time. The Grenadiers were on the right and the Coldstream on the left of the Battalion, the latter following a quarter of a mile behind, with Nos. 1 and 3 Companies to feed the Grenadiers and Nos. 4 and 2 for the Coldstream. As the front was so wide, they split the difference and kept as close as might be to the dividing line between the two leading Battalions, which ran by Mory Switch and Hally Avenue. The hot day broke with a gorgeous sunrise over a desolate landscape that reeked in all its hollows of gas and cordite. A moment or two after our barrage (field-guns only) opened, the enemy put down a heavy reply, and into the smoke and dust of it the companies, in artillery formation, walked up the road without hesitation or one man losing his place. No. 1 Company leading on the right disappeared at once