no less than the success of the campaign as a whole, depended on the faithful execution of all the minor Staff work of the Army, from the battalion upward.  The skill, precision and personal bravery required from the officers concerned are not as much realised, I think, as they ought to be by the public at home.  An officer engaged as a Brigade-Major in the fight on the Ancre, September, 1917, has written me a detailed account of four days’ experience in that battle, involving the relief of one brigade by another, and a successful but difficult attack, which gives a vivid idea of Staff work as carried on in the actual fighting line itself.  We see, first, the night journey of the four infantry battalions and their machine-gun company and trench-mortar battery, from Albert to Pozieres by motor-bus, then the four-mile march of the troops in darkness and rain along a duck-board track, to the trenches they were to relieve.  The Brigade-Major describes the elaborate preparation needed for every movement of the relief and the attack, and the anxiety in the Brigade Headquarters, a dug-out twenty feet below the ground, when the telephone—­which is constantly cut by shell fire—­fails to announce the arrival of each company at its appointed place.  Presently, the left company of the battalion on the left is missing.  In the darkness, and the congestion of men moving up to and back from the trenches on the narrow track, clearly something has gone wrong.  The Brigade-Major sets out to discover the why and wherefore.  The attack is to start at 6 A.M., and from 9 P.M. till nearly 5 A.M.—­that is, for close on eight hours, the Brigade-Major is up and down the track, inquiring into the causes of delay—­(a trench, for instance, has been blown in at one point, and the men forced into the mud beside it)—­watching and helping the assembly of the troops, and “hunting” for the company which has not arrived, and is “apparently lost.”  About five he returns to his brigade, hoping for the best.

Then, half an hour before the moment appointed for the advance, “we heard a bombardment starting.  The enemy had either discovered the hour of our attack, or were about to attack us.”  The Brigadier and his Brigade-Major anxiously go up to the top of their dug-out to survey the field.  It is clear that the British line is being heavily attacked.  Messages begin to arrive from the battalion commander on the left to say that all communication with his companies has now been cut.  The commander on the right also rings up to report heavy casualties.  Then the telephone wires on both sides are broken, and the Staff signal officer goes out to repair them under fire.  At last, precisely at the moment appointed, five minutes past six, in the rainy autumn dawn, our own guns—­an enormous concentration of them—­open a tremendous fire, and the earth-shaking noise “helps men to forget themselves, and go blind for the enemy.”  Then steadily the artillery barrage goes forward, one hundred yards every four minutes, and the infantry advance behind it, past the German front trench, to a ravine about three hundred yards further, which is known to be strongly held.  The final objective is a strong German position protecting a village in the valley of the Ancre.