“The blackest day for the German army in the history of the war.” This was Erich Ludendorff’s description of the opening day of the Battle of Amiens, which saw his forces lose somewhere in the region of 30,000 men, half of them as prisoners. Yet the reporting of this on page 5 is more muted than you might expect for such a momentous event; perhaps this might reflect the absence of Philip Gibbs, as H. W. Nevinson in his place doesn’t quite rise to his flowery heights, or had the number of times when the opening day of a battle engendered reporting which in modern parlance hyped a success which as events turned out was less extensive or somewhat ephemeral finally engendered a sense of circumspection? Ironically this success for Douglas Haig’s army would have more justified the cheerleading than most earlier battles; indeed this marks the opening of what would become known as the Hundred Days Offensive (even though it was slightly less in reality) which will bring the war to a conclusion. The countdown to the armistice had effectively begun.