At the same time the French, striking up from the south, had cleared their front up to the Amiens-Roye road from Pierrepont, through Plessier to Fresnoy, and had taken over three thousand prisoners and many guns. Caught thus on two fronts, the enemy fell back, abandoning stores and burning dumps, which latter sight it cheered our men to watch. But the work and the honour of the day, as of the Fourth Army's campaign from this point on, rested with the Canadian and Australian divisions who made up the larger part of it. The Australians Sir Archibald Montgomery describes in his monumental "Story of the Fourth Army" as "always inquisitive and seldom idle." The Canadians had exactly the same failings, and between the two dominions the enemy suffered. By the 12th August he had been forced back on to the edge of the used, desolate, and eaten-up country where he had established himself in 1916—a jungle of old wire, wrecked buildings, charred woods, and wildernesses of trench. It was ideal ground for machine-gun defence; with good protection against tanks and cavalry. There he went to earth, and there, after a little feeling along his line, was he left while the screw was applied elsewhere. Our front at that time ran from Bray-sur-Somme due south to Andechy, where we joined the French almost within machine-gun range of Roye.
North of Bray, to the western edge of the town of Albert, the left wing of the Fourth Army had the enemy held, worried and expectant. Now was the Third Army's turn to drive in the wedge, from north of Albert up the line to Arras where the right of the First Army would assist. What Headquarters knew of the enemy's morale on that sector was highly satisfactory. Moreover, he was withdrawing out of his Lys salient as his divisions were sucked down south to make up wastage there. But our men still expected that they would tramp their weary way back across every yard of their battle-fields and burial-grounds of the past two years, finishing up, if luck held, somewhere
