September 1918

The leave that opened in the last week of August ran on into September, the Masonic meeting on the 6th, then the crossing back. The diary resumes on September 9: the unit's war diary has him arriving back in camp about seven that evening, after a Savy stop on the way, and finding his unit in a trench-side bivouac not far from Hendecourt.

This 35-day silence falls across one of the most consequential stretches of the whole war: the Battle of the Canal du Nord (September 27 – October 1), Robertson's own Canadian Corps among the units that breached the Hindenburg Line there, at a cost of more than 10,000 casualties in five days, followed by the continued Hundred Days advance that was making the war's end increasingly clear. His private diary is silent for these weeks, but the unit's own war diary, which he wrote and signed as its officer commanding, is not: on September 27 he led one of two convoys of bridging wagons up to the canal, and his report on the days after it survives (see the document below). What also survives is the paper his brigade was drawing up as the silence began: the engineer plan for the Canal du Nord crossing, a draft, an air-photo appreciation of the German wire, and the Very Secret instruction itself, all issued in the days just after his last entry. His own letter written toward the end of the silence explains it: "For the last month or so have hardly been located in one place for any length of time... Things have been moving right along."