(PLATES 67 TO 73.)

Half a dozen miles from Amiens on the road to Albert one crosses the valley of a little stream at Pont Noyelles—an untouched valley, beautiful with tall trees and green meadows like a bit of Middlesex. The road climbs the combe on the eastern bank, and a little farther on crosses the narrow space "that just divides the desert from the sown." Onwards on the high ground from this point all greenness and beauty have disappeared, every tree has gone, and at one bound is reached the "desert" which covers thousands of square miles to east and north and south. Close to the point of change it was cheering to come across the inscription (Plate 67), doubtless scrawled by some plucky "Tommy" in the bad spring days of 1918, "Pessimists shot on sight." One hopes that the cheerful artist got through safely; it was just his spirit that gave the army that final victory which they believed in as strongly in our worst hours as at any other time.

The French had compelled the Germans to leave Albert in December, 1914, and it remained in the hands of the Allies until the German advance in 1918, when it was captured on the 27th of March. It was finally retaken by us on the 22nd of August. The little industrial town, originally containing some 7,000 inhabitants, was severely shelled during years by the Germans, and then for four months by ourselves, and reduced absolutely to ruins. Plate 68 is one of those officially taken, and gives a vivid idea of the condition of one of the principal streets of approach just after we had retaken it.

In April of 1919 (Plate 69)[30] it remained a ruin, and even a year later it could hardly be otherwise described. (I believe that Plates 68 and 69 correspond to nearly the same places.) But motoring through it some nine months after the Armistice, while it was still to all appearance very much in the condition indicated by the photographs, we were practically held up about 10 o'clock in the forenoon by a stream of some hundreds of people, carrying bags and all sorts of receptacles, making their way towards the railway-station. They must no doubt have found, somewhere, shelter enough to live and sleep in in cellars or otherwise, in spite of the destruction, and were on their way to Amiens to lay in supplies.

It was on the tower of the pilgrimage Church of Notre Dame de BrebiÈres that there stood for so long a statue of the Madonna in a position which appeared to defy gravity, and which provoked the prophecy that its fall would indicate the end of the war. The prophecy was not exactly fulfilled, but the great heap of rubbish in front of the church (Plate 70) is all that was left of the tower after our shelling of the town in 1918.

The road northwards from Albert to Miraumont (Plate 71) runs in the broad marshy valley of the River Ancre. The valley was originally thickly wooded, but was in 1918 covered with fallen tree-trunks, and Plate 72, which was taken close to Aveluy, gives some idea of its appearance. The ground on each side of the valley rises somewhat steeply for some 300 feet. The high ground on the east of the valley is that on which Thiepval and the German redoubts lay. On the west, farther north, lie Beaucourt, Beaumont-Hamel, and Miraumont, all of which were repeatedly the scenes of very heavy fighting. Beaucourt and Beaumont-Hamel were taken only at the very end of the 1916 campaign, in a short spell of possible weather.[31] Haig describes the defences here as of special and enormous strength.

At Beaumont-Hamel there was literally hand-to-hand fighting of the most severe kind. Mr. O'Neill describes the action graphically:

And these men were not even the "Contemptibles," but only "mercenaries" who had been civilians till a year or so before! Truly the German preconceived notions as to the British must have suffered rude shocks.

Plate 73 (again from an official photograph) was taken after the 1918 fighting, which covered episodes as noteworthy as those of four years earlier. The photograph is taken from a point near the "cross-roads" at Beaumont-Hamel, looking across the Ancre valley to the northern (lower) end of the Thiepval Ridge, and beyond it to the higher ground on which Bapaume stands.

The final attack across the Ancre began under Thiepval, when troops of the 14th Welsh crossed the river, wading breast deep through the flooded stream under heavy fire, holding their rifles and pouches above their heads, and formed up in the actual process of a German counter-attack, along the line held by the two companies who had crossed the previous morning.[33] A day later a part of the 64th Brigade (New Zealanders) started at 11.30 p.m. on a pitch-dark night, crossed the valley, and gained and held positions, half surrounded, until the covering troops arrived. This was on the slope near Miraumont seen across the valley in Plate 73.