An official visit to the Front during the great days of October, 1918, when our chief difficulty and our great object was to keep up with the retreating Germans, gave me some first-hand knowledge of the devastation of the country which had been the result of four years of war. Familiar—too familiar—as this was to our soldiers, we at home—if I may take myself as a fair example of the average man—could really form no idea, even from the most vivid of the correspondents' descriptions, of what the ruined country was actually like. Roads, fields, orchards, were a featureless waste of shell-holes, often already covered with rank herbage altogether disguising their original nature. Villages were only recognisable by painted notices, "This is Givenchy," or sometimes "This was Givenchy"; not a house, not a wall, not a gate-post to show where they had been. Large towns like Ypres or Lens or Albert were little more than piles of brick, stone, and timber rubbish, through which roads were being cleared between immense piles of dÉbris. In Rheims nearly as many houses were destroyed as the 13,000 said to have been burnt in the Great Fire of London, and smaller places like Soissons or Cambrai or Arras had suffered terribly. It was forbidden in our Army Areas at that time, no doubt for excellent reasons, to use a camera, but I made up my mind that when permission could be obtained I would do my best to secure some permanent record of what had happened.

It was only in September of 1919 that I was able, with my friend, Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Gill, D.S.O., R.A., to make a first photographic visit to the War Areas, and to get over a hundred views from Ypres to Verdun. At this time Major-General P. G. Grant was in charge of affairs at Headquarters at Wimereux. It was not without pardonable professional pride that I remembered that it was General Grant, a Royal Engineer Officer, who had on the 25th-26th of March, 1918, been chosen to organise the wonderfully constituted Company which General Haig's despatch euphemistically called, in enumerating the elements of which it consisted, a "mixed force." The days were critical, the French reserves had far to come and had not reached us, and the "mixed force," brought together in a few hours, proved sufficient addition to enable us to hold on, until the enemy, exhausted, could get no farther. General Grant was kind enough to give a brother Engineer every help, especially through his Area Commanders, Colonel Falcon, Colonel Carey, and Colonel Russell Brown, to all of whom we were much indebted. The result of this visit, and a second a few months later, has been that I have been able to take nearly 250 negatives of the places which were so much in our news and in our minds during the terrible four years of the war. I have thought that it might be interesting, both to the soldiers who fought for us all over France and Flanders and to their friends at home who heard from day to day of the places where they were fighting, to have something which would show what these places were really like, to turn the too familiar names into recognisable pictures, and this is my reason for publishing these photographs. In 1919 very little had as yet been done by way of reconstruction. In the spring of 1920, happily, a great deal had been done. But the photographs which follow indicate really—as well as the imperfections of a photograph allow—the condition of the places and of the country previous to reconstruction, and I am glad to be able to show my countrymen something of the condition to which our neighbour's country was brought by the war. Some realisation of this may enable us to understand better how keenly and overpoweringly the French desire that the terms of Peace with our common enemies should be such as will definitely prevent for ever the recurrence of these horrors.

In addition to my own photographs I have to acknowledge, with many thanks, permission from Sir Martin Conway to use Plates 43, 64, 68, and 73, which were taken officially at a time when outsiders were not allowed to photograph. I have also to thank Mr. Basil Mott for the use of his two picturesque views (Plates 49 and 69) of Lens and Albert under snow, Colonel Douglas Gill for the view on Kemmel Hill (Plate 32), and Mr. R. Godai for the photograph (Plate 18) of a destroyed pillbox.

ALEXANDER B. W. KENNEDY.

Albany,
August, 1921.

[viii]
[ix]