irst time in front of the big building
occupied by the Y.M.C.A. in Peronne we noticed that it was practically
intact. On entering the building we marvelled still more, for the first
object we saw was a fine German piano. Surely it was an act of kindness
on the part of the wily Hun to leave it for our men. Was it? When the
British occupied Peronne a company of troops from the west of England
were the first to enter that house. A Tommy who was musical made a
bee-line for the piano, but his officer restrained him, bidding him
first look inside. It was well he did so, for three powerful bombs were
attached to the strings of the piano, and had he touched one of the
keys concerned, he himself, the piano, and the building would have been
utterly destroyed. In the hut attached to the house a boxing match was
taking place on the evening of our arrival, and men had come from
outposts miles away to take part. Underneath the house was a German
dug-out of almost incredible depth. The original staircase was
missing--the Germans having commandeered the wood for the construction
of the dug-out--but it had been replaced by an ingenious Y.M.C.A.
secretary, who had searched amid the ruins of Peronne until at last he
had found another staircase, which, with infinite pains and labour and
not a little ingenuity, he had built in to replace the original one. The
day before our visit the old lady who had lived in the house before the
war paid a visit to her old home. She was a refugee, and had trudged
miles to get back to Peronne. She requested permission to dig in the
garden and soon unearthed the uniform of her husband who fought against
the Germans in 1870. She had buried it there before the fall of the
town. Digging again she came across his sword and accoutrements, and
deeper still, her silver spoons and other trinkets that she valued.
Could anything bring home more clearly the horrors of war? If, instead
of Peronne in Northern France, it had been that sweet little town in
England or Scotland, or that village in Wales or Ireland in which you
live! If you had heard the cry one evening, 'The Huns are coming,' and
had just half an hour in which to rush round your home and gather
together any things you specially treasured, and take them out into your
garden and bury them, knowing that anything you left behind would be
either looted and sent to Germany, or deliberately destroyed for sheer
hate! How easily this might have been, but for the mercy