Fields of Victory

A bewildering three weeks spent in a perpetually changing scene-changing, and yet, outside Paris, in its essential elements terribly the same-that is how my third journey toFrance, since the war began, appears to me as I look back upon it. My dear daughtersecretary and I have motored during January some nine hundred miles through the lengthand breadth of France, some of it in severe weather. We have spent some seven days on theBritish front, about the same on the French front, with a couple of nights at Metz, and asimilar time at Strasburg, and rather more than a week in Paris. Little enough! But what atime of crowding and indelible impressions! Now, sitting in this quiet London house, I seemto be still bending forward in the motor-car, which became a sort of home to us, lookingout, so intently that one's eyes suffered, at the unrolling scene. I still see the grim desolationof the Ypres salient; the heaps of ugly wreck that men call Lens and Lieviny and Souchez;and that long line of Notre Dame de Lorette, with the Bois de Bouvigny to the west of it-where I stood among Canadian batteries just six weeks before the battle of Arras in 1917. The lamentable ruin of once beautiful Arras, the desolation of Douai, and the villagesbetween it and Valenciennes, the wanton destruction of what was once the heart ofCambrai, and that grim scene of the broken bridge on the Cambrai-Bapaume road, overthe Canal du Nord, where we got out on a sombre afternoon, to look and look again at alandscape that will be famous through the world for generations: they rise again, with thesharpness of no ordinary recollection, on the inward vision. So too Bourlon Wood, high anddark against the evening sky; the unspeakable desolation and ruin of the road thence toBapaume; Bapaume itself, under the moon, its poor huddled heaps lit only, as we walkedabout it, by that strange, tranquil light from overhead, and the lamps of our standingmotor-car; some dim shapes and sights emerging on the long and thrice-famous road fromBapaume to Albert, first, the dark mound of the Butte de Warlencourt, with three whitecrosses on its top, and once a mysterious light in a fragment of a ruined house, the onlylight I saw on the whole long downward stretch from Bapaume to Albert. Then the churchof Albert, where the hanging Virgin used to be in 1917, hovering above a town that for allthe damage done to it was then still a town of living men, and is now a place so desolatethat one shrinks from one's own voice in the solitude, and so wrecked that only the trafficdirections here and there, writ large, seem to guide us through the shapeless heaps thatonce were streets. And, finally, the scanty lights of Amiens, marking the end of the first partof our journey