Sometimes I had the odd sensation that there were many more marching with the battery than would ever again answer the roll-call. I was riding at the head of my section half asleep about midnight, when a horseman came up at the gallop and reined in beside me. I expected to hear him deliver some message; instead he dropped into a walk at my side. His steel helmet shadowed his face. I was too weary to speak unnecessarily and took him for one of my sergeants. Perhaps I drowsed; when I again noticed him the moon was coning out from under cloud. Then I saw that he was wearing an officer’s uniform. That piqued me into wakefulness. I leant forward to get a closer glimpse of his features. As I did so, he flung his horse back on its haunches, wheeled to the left and vanished in the dark. During the brief space while I gazed on him, I recognized Tubby Grain. Other men in the battery are telling similar stories. They have seen Big Dan, Standish and many of their fallen comrades. They ride on the limbers and the wagons; they plod persistently behind the guns. They do not seek to attract attention to themselves. They do not talk or inconvenience anybody. Having died in a foreign land, it seems normal and right that their spirits should still accompany us. At dawn they vanish. As regards Tubby Grain, since the first time I have never seen his face—only his plump little figure going at the trot through the darkness down the column. And now our marches are, for the time being, at an end. Once again we have been flung in as the hammerhead of the attack. They say that Foch’s principle is to use up his storm-troops; he never relieves them when once an offensive has begun. We no longer guess—we know the task that lies before us. Last time it was the saving of Amiens; this time it is the breaking of the Hindenburg Line. Two nights ago we pulled into action across the bald chalky country that straddles the Cambrai-Arras road. To the north of us, rising out of the blackness of the Vimy Plain, we could see the ridge which was so long our home and which, because we were not allowed to die, we guarded with so much impatience. Ah, how impatient we were while the indignity of not dying was upon us! How little we valued the supreme gift of life! How we courted death in raid after raid throughout the summer! Had we known then how few sunny days remained for most of us, how much more gratefully we should have lived them. We have come back for what will probably be our severest test to very nearly the spot whence we started. Nobody now garrisons what was once regarded as the Gibraltar of the Western Front. Our armies have swept forward like a tidal wave and are beating on the doors of the cities in the plain, which a month ago looked so distant and impregnable.