November 29, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
for the element of suiprise which was so successfully intro- 
duced. Accounts differ as to whether the preliminary boni- 
bardmcnt was entirely suppressed, or whether a certain 
measure of gun fire was used to drown the noise of the 
approaching machines. But at any rate the enemy was thor- 
oughly taken by sinprise and to that we owe the great success 
whicli followed. 
Naw let us tiu-n to the way in which the fruits of that 
success might be reaped. 
We have seen that this driving of a great wedge through 
the shattered defensive system of the enemy created two 
flanks, one facing north and one facing south. It was the 
first of these which ivas the vital one— (the flank running from 
near Fontaine to Moeuvres) — because it turned the Queant- 
Drocoiirt switch line which covers Doiiai and the railway com- 
munications with Lille and Belgium, and because it had corre- 
sponding to it fifty miles away the big bulge created- towards 
Roulers by the recent occupation of the Passchendaele Ridge. 
If this northern flank could be pushed further, not only 
Cambrai would go, but all the defensive system between 
Cambrai and Lille. It was on to this northern flank, there- 
fore, that the energy of the new advance turned, converted 
by nearly a right angle from its original direction. 
Now in this northern flank, which runs from the neigh- 
bourhood of Inchy to the suburbs of Cambrai (a distance of 
about seven miles) there is present a natural feature of which 
the enemy took immediate advantage in his defence, and 
which has been the centre of a great battle all during the Fri- 
day, Saturday, and Sunday of last week. This natural 
feature is an elongated hill known as the Bourlon Hill, 
crowned with its wood, known as Bourlon Wood — both 
named from I'he little village of Bourlon upon the northern 
slope. Complete possession of this hill will be the test of 
success. 
Bourlon Wood 
Bourlon Hill with its wood, is the obstacle or bastion which 
mterrupts the effort to roll up northwards and use the flank 
created by the British on the previous days. The British 
having got behind the Queant line into country where no arti- 
ficial defensive was yet prepared, and where their advance 
could only be checked by pouring in masses of men, nature 
had provided thfe enemy here with the dominating mass of 
Bourlon Hill, rendered more formidable by the fact that its 
height was covered with wood. At this point we shall do 
well to examine this obstacle in greater detail, and for that 
purpose I append the annexed Map IV. 
The general level from which we may take heights of any 
prominence to rise in this region is the contour of 70 metres 
above the sea. The watercourses are slightly below that 
contour (for instance the brook near Moeuvres is 62 metres 
only) and the opjn rolling fields swell up to somewhat over the 
80 metre contour. Cambrai in its hollow is, at the Scheldt, 
less than 50 metres above the sea. But all round the imme- 
diate^neighbourhood of Bourlon Hill 70 metres is our base line, 
so to speak, from which wc can best measure prominent 
heights. 
Now. taking this 70 metre contour as our base line, Bourlon 
Hill is a sort of pear-shaped" lump the axis of which runs from 
just a little south of west to just a little north of east. It is 
rather less than 8,000 yardis or five miles in length, and its 
flanks arc marked by fosiir villages, Bourlon, Moeuvres, 
Anncux and Fontaine. Bourlon itself, giving its name to the 
whole system, is on the north and built right on the flanks of 
the hill. Moeuvres is on the west beyond a little brook, 
which) marks the lowest point of the system upon this side. 
Anneux is on the south beycmd the Bapaume-Cambrai road ; 
while on the south-east is F ontaine Notre Dame, which lies 
astraddle of that road bet^veen the 60 and the 70 metre 
contours. 
The height rises regularly aip to a summit rather over a mile 
long, but only a quarter of :i mile across, the height defining 
which is on the loo-metrc contour ; and on this summit there 
are two slightly higher portions, an eastern and a western, with 
a very shallow saddle betwee-n them. It will be seen from this 
that the hill rises roughly loo' feet or somewhat over 30 metres 
from the general levels around. 
Not exactly correspondir^ wth its summit, but over- 
lapping the greater part of it, and coming down upon the 
northern, southern and eastern sides is Bourlon Wood, roughly 
rectangular in shape and uaiher less than a square mile in 
area — say, some 600 acres. There are several rides through 
the wood by wliich vehicles can move and along which, pro- 
bably, tanks could operate ; the most important of them for 
the purpose of advancing upon and holding the height is the 
Y-shaped system, the two southern branches of which meet 
on the saddle, and the stem of which is e.xtended northward 
to the neighbourhood of BourSon village, marked upon Map II. 
With these features of the ground present to our imagina- 
tion, we may appreciate the task which lay before either 
party in the struggle for this height. I should mention here, 
by the way, that my contours on Map 11. are only rough and 
approximate, and that I am speaking of the wood as it existed 
in peace time ; for there has been no public information as to 
what the enemy may have done in the way of cutting. 
The hill was ot value to the enemy for concealing his artillery 
behind it, and the wood upon its summit is a formidable ob- 
stacle, such as have been all the woods in this war upon the 
West. The enemy had here peculiar advantages for resistance 
also in the simplicity of the hill ; in tJie fact that its length 
was spread out in front of his oppoix-nt and in the complete 
domination it gave him over all the surrounding country for 
observation, as did its reverse side for concealment. It pre- 
sented corresponding difficulties of access and capture to thq 
offensive. 
Domination of the) Railway 
On the other hand, once it was held the chief strength of all 
that enemy position was lost. Th'^se upon its summit wrre 
directly east of Cambrai and dominated the hollow in which 
Cambrai lay by a height of some 200 feet and at a distance of 
less than 7,000 yards. They could see and dominate at a range 
of only 6,000 yards the great main railway to Lille and 
Valenciennes. 
At the beginning of the operations the British, at the 
