CANADIAN TROOPS AT THE GATES OF CAMBRAI.

TWO DAYS FIGHTING.

From PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, Saturday. Our troops are gaining such brilliant successes all along the line that one can hardly keep pace with their progress. To-day, while our Second Army, with Allied forces, were striking between Armentières and the coast, regaining Wytschaete and many old places for which our men fought long and hard a year ago I went to another ridge above Bourlon village, ours only yesterday for the first time in history, looked into the city of Cambrai, and saw outspread our promised land where, if things go well, we may spend this winter beyond the belt of desolation now behind us. The Canadians were almost at the gates of Cambrai when I went among them to-day, and where, across fields of thistles, lying low, because the enemy still had observation of us, I looked at the battle being fought. It was clear that our men were beyond the village of Raillencourt, just to the left of Cambrai, because the German guns were shelling it fiercely, clouds of rosy smoke rising from its streets as the red-brick cottages were hit by high explosives. Later in the day I met some tank crows who had just come back from an early morning adventure there. One tank was commanded by a lance-corporal, and he and a bright boy with him, once in the cavalry, told how they cruised round the north side of the village and then worked down its streets. At the south end they came across belts of barbed wire and trampled them down, and then made straight for a machine-gun nest which was firing at them. They put it out of action with their heavy gun, and the German machine-gunners fled from them.

TANKS’ SPLENDID WORK.

In all this battle since yesterday morning, when it began with such triumph, our tanks have done splendid work. Not many of them were used, and some of those were veterans, who saw fighting in Flanders, but are still going strong. When the battle opened yesterday they crossed the Canal du Nord on bridges and made under heavy fire by our engineers, and worked up to Bourlon Wood, where they trampled down machine-gun emplacements and did good service to the Canadian infantry. One tank crossed a mined road, and the ground exploded under it, but only one man was wounded. To-day I saw other tanks going into action, crawling up the road like long slugs as one saw them in the grey light of rainstorms. With gunners following them and gun transport going forward in streams, and down the tracks on every side of them German prisoners in small groups, and German wounded carrying for down comrades on stretchers. An officer of the Tank Corps hailed us, and was in high spirits with the success of the two days’ work. “They have been grand days for the tanks,” he said. “We have fairly put it across the Boche.” There was a marvellous picture of open warfare to-day on the battlefields, and great painters should have been there to put down for all time the colour and movement and sweep of it, though no painter could quite bring back to the senses the horror as well as the heroism of these scenes. For one walked past many horrors on the way of our advance, where German dead and ours lay as they fell in the fight for the canal crossings and upwards to Bourlon Wood. There were few of ours, but if one had any pity in one’s heart it was moved by the sight of those field-grey men lying scattered there, terribly mangled by our fire, so that they had lost all look of humanity. And some horses lay about killed by the harassing fire of the German long-range guns yesterday or to-day, and the wind that blew over these fields was tainted with death.