The most decisive battle of the British front in the "come-back,"
after our days of retreat, was when with the gallant help of American
troops of the 27th New York Division our men of the English Midlands,
the 46th Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line along
the St.-Quentin Canal. That canal was sixty feet wide, with steep
cliffs rising sheer to a wonderful system of German machine-gun
redoubts and tunneled defenses, between the villages of Bellicourt and
Bellinglis. It seemed to me an impossible place to assault and
capture. If the enemy could not hold that line they could hold
nothing. In a dense fog on Sunday morning, September 30th, our men,
with the Americans and Australians in support, went down to the canal-
bank, waded across where the water was shallow, swam across in life-
belts where it was deep, or got across somehow and anyhow, under
blasts of machine-gun fire, by rafts and plank bridges. A few hours
after the beginning of the battle they were far out beyond the German
side of the canal, with masses of prisoners in their hands.
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