gun-emplacements, rough defences that as the German Army retreated our
men had taken over and altered to their own needs; while to the west
lay the valley of the Sensee with its marshes, the scene of some of
the most critical fighting of the war.

From the wrecked centre of Cambrai a short run over field roads takes
you to the high ground north-west of the city which witnessed some of
the fiercest fighting of last autumn. I still see the jagged ruins of
the little village of Abancourt--totally destroyed in two days'
bombardment--standing sharp against the sky, on a ridge which looks
over the Sensee valley; the shell-broken road in which the car--most
complaisant of cars and most skilful of drivers!--finally stuck; and
those hastily dug shelters on the road-side in one of which I suddenly
noticed a soldier's coat and water-bottle lying just as they had been
left two months before. There were no terrible sights now in these
lonely fields as there were then, but occasionally, as with this coat,
the refuse of battle took one back to the living presences that once
filled these roads--the _men_, to whom Marshal Haig expresses the
gratitude of a great Commander in many a simple yet moving passage of
his last dispatch.

And every step beyond Cambrai, desolate as it is, is thronged with
these invisible legions. There to our right rises the long line of
Bourlon Wood--here are the sand-pits at its foot--and there are the
ruined fragments of Fontaine-notre-Dame. There rushes over one again
the exultation and the bitter recoil of those London days in November,
1917, when the news of the Cambrai battle came in; the glorious
surprise of the tanks; the triumphant progress of Sir Julian Byng; the
evening papers with their telegrams, and those tragic joy-bells that
began to ring; and then the flowing back of the German wave; the
British withdrawal from that high wood yonder which had cost so much
to win, and from much else; the bewilderment and disappointment at
home. A tired Army, and an attack pushed too far?--is that the summing
up of the first battle of Cambrai? A sudden gleam had shone on that
dark autumn which had seen the bitter victory and the appalling losses
of Passchendaele, and then the gleam vanished, and the winter closed
in, and there was nothing for the British Army but to turn its steady
mind to the Russian break-down and to the ever-growing certainty of a
German attack, fiercer and more formidable than had ever yet br