He ends on what he calls "another small point which deserves mention": "When the officers and men of those two attacking battalions lay in the mud on that pitch-black night, soaked to the skin and shivering with cold, as they lay there waiting for the awful hour when it seems as if horror itself has been let loose, and as they wondered in their own minds what lay before them, gradually the German bombardment started, and then by degrees increased in intensity, until for fully thirty minutes before zero hour it became perfect hell.

Every one of those officers and men, without a doubt, realised that the enemy had discovered that he was going to be attacked, and that he would be on the alert and waiting for them.

Yet did any one of them falter, did any one of them for a single moment dream of not starting with the rest of his comrades and doing what he knew it was his duty to do ?" "I only know two things: Firstly, that a very great number of them, if not all, realised only too well that the enemy had discovered our plans; and, secondly, that the only ones who did not start were those who could not, because they had been either killed or wounded." And now turn with me to the top of all--the General Staff of the Army in France--the brain of the whole mighty movement.

It was with no light emotion that I found myself last January, on a bitter winter day, among a labyrinth of small rooms running round the quadrangle of the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, while they were still full of Staff officers gathering up the records of the war.

Here, or in the Staff train moving with the Commander-in-Chief along the front, the vast organisation of battle culminated in a few guiding brains from which energising and unifying direction flowed out to all parts of the field of war.