(PLATES 79 TO 87.)

West of Cambrai and south to St. Quentin lay over thirty miles of the strongest part of the Hindenburg Line, that "granite wall of 24,000 square kilometres." The southern end of the much-talked-of "Switch Line" at QuÉant, ten miles west of Cambrai, had been forced by the First and Third Armies on the 2nd of September, 1918, but the defence was still strong, and it was only on the 10th of October that I was greeted, on arriving at Colonel Gill's quarters, with the welcome news that Cambrai had just fallen. Two days later I was able to visit the city. The central part (Plate 79) was still burning, having been fired by the Germans on their evacuation, but it was possible to get round by the suburbs; only an occasional shell still reached the town. (It is hardly necessary to say that the photograph, taken many months later, shows the Place d'Armes only after it had been cleared up, and not in the state in which it was when the city was entered.) The railway-station was destroyed, the windows of most houses had disappeared, and walls were cracked everywhere. But on the whole the destruction (obviously largely due to bombing as well as shell-fire) was not nearly so complete or so irreparable as at Rheims or Ypres or Lens. The tower of the cathedral (Plate 80), a church rebuilt about sixty years ago, looks as if it could hardly stand permanently. There were many houses in the suburbs which, although much damaged, could be made habitable without very serious difficulty. But it is to be remembered that the wanton destruction of household property, down to the very toys of the children, must have caused the returning inhabitants here and in many other places even more intense feeling about the invaders than the mere destruction of the houses themselves, which had come to be recognised as an inevitable consequence of the state of war, and might, in fact, have been caused by combatants on either side.

I have before me an airplane plan of Cambrai, which I obtained from the First Army in 1918 and which is an excellent example of the great skill and success we had obtained in aerial surveys. As it is printed it is very nearly a map on a scale of 6 inches to the mile, although it is a mosaic of prints from eight or nine different negatives, taken, as the direction of the shadows shows, at at least four different times. But the joins between the different prints are in many cases invisible, and the map as a whole only wants the names of the streets to make it complete.

West of Cambrai, about four miles on the road to Bapaume, and on a little rising ground, stands the Bourlon Wood, which has for us a history perhaps even more tragic than that of the woods north of the Somme. The full story of our attempt to take Cambrai in November, 1917, the first accounts of which induced foolish authorities to have "joybells" rung (a proceeding which they must have bitterly regretted afterwards), is given in Haig's Despatches (pp. 153-171). The large-scale map by which it is accompanied shows how we gained the wood, and were, in fact, close to Cambrai for a week, but a week later had lost nearly the whole of our gains. The photograph (Plate 81) is taken from the village at the north-west corner of the wood, the farthest point which we reached on the 23rd-24th November. It was in this fighting that a small party of East Surreys were rescued after having held out, surrounded, for forty-eight hours, while later on a company of the 13th Essex, entirely surrounded and without hope of relief, fought to the last man rather than surrender. Bourlon Wood was only recovered, in our final great advance, on the 27th of September, 1918.

The road from Cambrai to Le Cateau, the scene of so much fighting both in August, 1914, and in October, 1918 (see p. 78), runs eastwards from Cambrai. I was able to visit a number of the villages south of the road in October, 1918 (finding in some houses the hastily left meals of their late German occupants), while fighting still continued a few miles farther north, and was surprised to find that they were very little injured in spite of the indications of heavy barrage over the face of the ground. The fighting here had gone over the ground too rapidly to leave behind it the fearful trail of destruction which is everywhere visible on the land where fighting was continuous for many weeks, or even months, together.

The south-eastern suburbs of Cambrai and the villages on that side of the town show no very extensive signs of destruction, but on the south-west and farther to the south, where the fighting across the Hindenburg Line was so severe, everything is destroyed. West of Cambrai, and for many miles to the south, lay the part of the Hindenburg defences known as the Siegfried Line, the strongest section of which, and that part deemed by the Germans to be practically impregnable, included the deep cutting of the canal between Bellicourt (Riqueval) and Bellenglise. For 6,000 yards before reaching Bellicourt the canal runs in a tunnel, the southern end of which, and the high ground above it, as well as the village of Bellicourt, is seen in Plate 82. The Americans had been told off to deal with the country over the tunnel, and did so quite successfully, but they unfortunately neglected to clear up behind them, so that the Germans, getting up from the tunnel by shafts which they had provided for the purpose, attacked them from the rear with serious consequences, and the Australians, following on, had a somewhat hard time. We had some talk with a good lady and her family who lived in a house just above the mouth of the tunnel, in which a number of German officers had been quartered. It was curious to notice how, after beginning to speak quite quietly, she and her daughter became more and more excited as their recital continued, under the recollection of the nightmare of the German occupation, although in this case there had happily been no special brutality to bring to mind.

Southwards for a couple of miles from Bellicourt towards Bellenglise the canal runs in the deep cutting seen in Plate 83, which was taken from above the tunnel mouth. The banks of the cutting are 60 or 70 feet high, very steep, and covered with thick vegetation—covered also, in 1918, with barbed wire. On the east side the bank carried, in addition, many concrete machine-gun emplacements. The water in the canal was very deep near the tunnel, and did not shallow until it nearly reached Bellenglise. The attack was carried out by Midland Territorials (Stafford and Lancashire), and had immediate success. It is specially mentioned by General Haig, and well described by General Maurice, and with natural enthusiasm and much detail by Major Priestley.[34] It was preceded by a barrage, lasting forty-eight hours, from about 1,600 guns of various calibres, and then—for once—the weather favoured us, for at zero hour, 5.50, on the morning of the attack (the 29th of September)[35] the whole country was covered with a thick fog, under which our men advanced, invisible to their enemies, although with some difficulty to themselves. The 46th Division scrambled down the cutting (where it will be seen that there was no jumping-off place on that side), and got across by swimming (with life-belts), by improvised rafts and collapsible boats, and all the devices which had been tested on the Somme at Brie (see Plate 66) a few days earlier. It seems uncertain whether any of the German foot-bridges had been left undestroyed, but the Riqueval Bridge (Plate 84) had not been knocked down by our shelling, and still stood as it was when I last saw it, carrying a notice that it was safe "for infantry in file only." Major Priestley tells the story of how Captain Charlton, with a small party of nine men, found his way by compass to the bridge, charged down on the sentries (one N.C.O. getting four of them just in time), cut the wires, and threw the blasting charges into the canal. The bridge was saved and held by 8.30, and naturally proved most useful.

Among Major Priestley's stories of this adventure he tells how two R.A.M.C. privates (Moseley and George) collected prisoners, dressed the wounded and made the prisoners carry them, and finally arrived at quarters as the sole escort of twenty stretcher cases and seventy-five unwounded prisoners.[36]

At Bellenglise (at the bend of the canal two miles south of Bellicourt) the Germans had made for themselves an extraordinary underground tunnel shelter, of which Plate 85 shows one of the entrances. We were told by the villagers that it was a kilometre and a half in length, but did not verify this. In any case it was certainly fitted up as barracks and quarters of the most extensive nature, for a thousand prisoners were taken in it with no resistance. It was also provided with electric light, and we are told that the captured electricians who were instructed to start the dynamo for us had to confess the existence of a booby-trap to blow up the whole affair when the switch was closed, and, of course, to remove it.

St. Quentin is five miles south of Bellenglise, but the crossing of the Hindenburg Line at the canal tunnel at St. Tronquoy, a necessary preliminary to taking the city, proved a task almost as difficult, but quite as successfully carried out, as the Bellicourt crossing. It was effected on the 30th of September. St. Quentin itself, which had been within the German lines ever since 1914, was entered by the French First Army on the next day. When it became clear to the Germans that they would have to give up the town, which was but little damaged, they prepared a characteristic piece of devilment, one which could not by any exercise of imagination be supposed to have the slightest military consequence. They cut out large recesses (each of about a couple of cubic feet) in the walls and columns of the cathedral, with the intention of using the cavities so made for blasting charges to wreck the whole building (Plate 86). I did not count the number of these holes, but it was officially stated to be ninety! Happily the French got into the town twenty-four hours before their entry had been expected, so that the church still stands (not, of course, without some other damage), with the holes and the blocks cut out from them visible as damning evidence of what otherwise would be no doubt denied. But very much the same seems to have been done by the same savages at other places, as far apart even as PÉronne and Beersheba.

The region between the Arras-PÉronne and the Cambrai-St. Quentin roads has been fought over both by French and British. Going eastwards from the crossing of the Somme at Brie the country already showed signs of renewed cultivation, but some villages, like Mons and Bernes, were totally destroyed, and others, like EstrÉes, Vraignes, and Hancourt, and the little town of Vermand, had been very badly strafed. Near Cambrai, villages such as Bony and Vendhuille, Gouzeaucourt and RibÉcourt (Plate 87), and of course Bourlon, were quite in ruins. At Gouzeaucourt very active reconstruction was, however, going on, and rows of neat brick cottages had already appeared. To mention all the ruined villages would be to give almost a complete list of them, but over the whole region active and obviously successful attempts were being made to carry on cultivation, the surface having been by no means so badly damaged as farther north.

Southwards from St. Quentin, also, much cultivation is being actively carried on, although many of the villages, such as Liez and Essigny, are badly injured; but after La FÈre is reached, and beyond the Oise, cultivation is complete, and the conditions are more or less normal as far as the Ailette and the Aisne. North of Cambrai also, on the east of the Cambrai-Douai road, where the country was always in German occupation, and behind the Hindenburg defence lines, its condition is also normal.