take place as a preliminary to the assault, is the choosing of suitable sites for the Headquarters of the higher formations. On the 26th, therefore, a party of the General Staff, with one representative from each Brigade and the O.C. Signal Company, made a tour of the country behind the front line and of the front line itself, and settled on a joint Brigade Headquarters in a portion of the line where three or four deep dug-outs, sufficient to shelter the Staffs from moderately heavy shell fire, existed. This position, unnamed except by a map reference (G, 2I, c, 2.1), subsequently became the headquarters of the 137th Infantry Brigade when this Brigade stormed the Canal, and was later used as Divisional Headquarters by the 32nd Division when it passed through the 46th Division after the attack. At the same time it was decided to move forward Advanced Divisional Headquarters to Small Post Wood, a small copse about a mile N.N.E. of Vendelles, from which place communication forward could be maintained more satisfactorily.
The problem of communication in a battle such as the one projected was a difficult one. Both our own troops and the enemy were strongly entrenched, and a preliminary bombardment of exceptional intensity was necessary before our assaulting columns could be hurled at the enemy entrenchments with any chance of success, while such a bombardment necessarily invited heavy retaliatory fire. It was practically a trench warfare attack without the buried cable system which alone had rendered communication in trench warfare possible.
A strong system of overland cables was designed to meet the case, but these lines were, as they were bound to be, cut by shell fire again and again before the attack commenced. In fact, the party laying the forward lines was out working during the whole of the night preceding
