In the old days battles were won by generals who led their troops. A person, sharing the dangers and setting an example by their courage. They were on the spot as eye-witnesses, and recognized to a second when the moment to take hazards had arrived. To-day of necessity our generals and their staffs are deskmen, with the natural caution and scepticism of deskmen. They sit far back of the line, remote from shell-fire, in chbteaux fitted out like surveyors’ offices with typewriters, photographs, scales and maps. They do all their fighting on paper. When they are directing an attack, they collect their information by telephone, doubt it, sift it, weigh it, ponder it and discuss it, when lightning action is all that is required. Many of them have never been anything but deskmen since this war started; their combatant experience was gained years ago in little sporting rough-and-tumbles with aborigines on the outskirts of civilization. Because they have never personally endured the modern hell into which they have to fling their men, they can form no mental picture of the situations that occur, and the prompt action that should be taken. They are equipped for planning the preliminary details of a show; but their control of an attack, when once it has started, is paralyzing. So much is this the case that it’s a common saying among the men that the battles which we win in the trenches are lost by the staff-people who are behind. On the morning of August the eighth the weather conditions were all in our favour. The fog was worth several extra divisions to us. It kept the enemy guessing. We knew what we intended to do, but he had to find out. The fog enabled us to conceal our intentions up to the very last moment. Until we were upon him, he had no knowledge of the directions from which we were approaching; by the time we were upon him it was too late for him to take the proper defensive steps. The first warning he had was when out of the deathly stillness our murderous barrage came roaring and screaming about his head. Never on any front has there been so tremendous a concentration of guns as we let loose on him that morning. The weight of shells and mass of explosives that we threw over him literally rolled up the landscape and pinned everything living to the ground. It passed over his trench-system like a gigantic plough, burying men and weapons, and travelled on into the distance by a pre-arranged series of leaps and bounds. The tanks, following the curtain of fire and lumbering ahead of the infantry, trampled into flatness whatever resistance the creeping barrage had spared.