As the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers travelled from the Middle East to France, Drury continued to be dogged by malaria. That also affected many others in the battalion and in their initial weeks in France they were treated with ample doses of quinine. Meanwhile, with the 10th Division formally remaining in the Middle East (though without any of its Irish battalions and therefore minus its ‘Irish’ nomenclature), Drury's battalion joined 197th Brigade in the 66th (2nd East Lancashire) Division in late July. Alongside them were their 10th (Irish) Division comrades, the 5th Connaught Rangers. However, both units were moved within the Division in August, by which point brigades were down to three battalions each: the 5th Connaught Rangers went to 199th Brigade and the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers to 198th where they served with the 5th Inniskillings and the 6th Lancashire Fusiliers. Drury visited Rouen on leave but found himself again suffering from the eye problems he had had in the past. He was confined to hospital for much of August before a period of leave home to the UK (some of which was spent in Ireland and some visiting friends in Scotland). He eventually rejoined his battalion on 16 September 1918 in the Somme area just under 40 miles west of Arras. By this stage of the war, Allied progress was rapid. The German attempt at a decisive advance in March–April had been resisted and instead German forces were ‘doomed by the summer’. The Allied offensive launch at Amiens on 8 August began the ‘Hundred Days’, which saw first a series of probes into German position and then, from late September, a more general allied offensive. Some of this rested on superior fighting strength: the Allies’ 1,672,000 infantry in the field by August were over a quarter of a million men more than German forces. These additional numbers were coordinated effectively with aircraft and artillery, plus the allies were vastly superior in tanks. To cap all of this, German morale collapsed. However, to make the most of these opportunities, it was necessary for the infantry to be able to advance rapidly in a changing situation, and as Peter Simkins points out, ‘The average British division’, in contrast to the Germany Army during their 1918 spring offensive, had ‘the capacity to keep up the pressure on the enemy over much of the three-month period of the Hundred Days’.