summer of 1917, and the unexpected had happened. The whole of the
seventeen and a half miles of trenches were in the hands of the British!
The enemy had retired to the much advertised 'Hindenburg Line,' and
leaving nothing to chance, was tirelessly, ceaselessly massing and
training his men, getting together huge reserves of munitions,
husbanding his resources in every possible way, and preparing, always
preparing day and night for his next great move. Meanwhile, Italy's
defences had to be strengthened by troops we could ill-afford to spare
from our Western front, and Russia, in loyalty to whom we first entered
the war, failed us altogether, German intrigue being the underlying
cause in each case. In his great advance in March and April 1918 he did
not achieve all he set out to do by any means, but his gains were
enormous. It makes one sad to think of the territory we had temporarily
to relinquish to the Hun in Picardy, even though the country itself was
not of any intrinsic value. The land is desolate, and the enemy ruined
every village and hamlet, every farm and cottage, before his retreat.
Ninety-three Red Triangle centres--huts, marquees, cellars, dug-outs,
and 'strafed' houses had to be abandoned in Picardy alone--most of them
destroyed before they fell into the hands of the Germans.

During the first visit to the battlefields of the Somme in the winter of
1916, the outstanding feature of the landscape was the mud and the
general desolation. In the summer of 1917 the scenes of desolation were
as great as ever, but there was a difference--the roads were in
excellent condition and bridges had been replaced. There were
shell-holes everywhere and the countryside was strewn with dud shells;
barbed wire entanglements; with here and there a stranded tank that had
had to be abandoned in the mud; the remains of trenches and dug-outs or
the cages in which the Huns had collected their British prisoners. There
were no domestic animals to be seen, and no civilians. The whole
district from Albert to Peronne, to Bapaume or to Arras, was one huge
cemetery, and one saw side by side the elaborate cross that marked the
burying place of German dead, the smaller cross with the tricolour on
it, that marked the last resting-place of the soldier of France, and
everywhere for miles and miles could be seen the little plain brown
crosses of wood, that marked the spot where lay our own loved dead. We
climbed to the top of the famous Butte of