“AS GOOD AS THE GUARDS”

Two platoons of these troops had a queer and hazardous adventure on the way up at a place called Fooley Trench. They found they had plunged into a hornets’ nest, with machine-guns on each side of them, and a special smoke barrage had to be put up for them, so that they could get back behind its veil. “They were as good as the Guards,” said some of the Guards themselves on the morning of the recent attack, and that is praise worth having from men who have a fine pride in themselves. Their officers cannot say too much in admiration of these boys, who, after long and hard fighting in earlier battles, have gone forward again with such high spirit and patient courage and grim sticking power. Their capture of Croisilles is of big importance to our general scheme of things, opening the way to the further advance on Bullecourt, It forces the enemy back on to the Drocourt-quéant line, which he will hold for a time if he can with a kind of outer bastion of trenches swinging in a loop, which leaves Bullecourt on our side of it. The situation yesterday remained in our favour, in spite of the desperate efforts of the enemy to beat us back and retake some of his lost ground, like Monchy. Highlanders north of the Scarpe had held on to Roeux, with its famous and horrible ruin of chemical works just beyond them, and south of the river we were on the Wancourt Ridge.