ich stretches, as my map tells me, right across Northern France,
from the Ypres salient, in front of Lille and Douai, through this
point south-west of Cambrai where I am standing, and again over those
distant slopes to the south-west over which the shades are gathering,
to St. Quentin and St. Gobain. These miles of half-effaced and
abandoned trenches, with all those scores of other miles to the
north-west and the south-east which the horizon covers, represent, as
I have said, the culminating effort of the war; the last effective
stand of the German brought to bay; the last moment when Ares,
according to Greek imagination, "the money changer of war," who weighs
in his vast balance the lives of men, still held the balance of this
mighty struggle in some degree uncertain. But the fortress fell; the
balance came down on the side of the Allies, and from that moment,
though there was much fighting still to do, the war was won.

As to the actual meaning in detail of the "Hindenburg" or "Siegfried"
line, let me, for the benefit of those who have never seen even a yard
of it, come back to the subject presently, helped by a captured German
document, and by a particularly graphic description of it, written by
an officer of the First Army.

But first, with the scene still before me--the broken bridge, the
ruined lock, the splendid trench at my feet, and those innumerable
white lines on the far hill-side--let me recall the great story of the
six months which preeceded the attack of Sir Julian Byng's Third Army
on this bank of the Canal du Nord.

It was on Monday, March 25th, that at Doullens, a small manufacturing
town, lying in a wooded and stream-fed hollow not far from Amiens,
there took place the historic meeting of the leading politicians and
generals of the war, which ended in the appointment of Marshal Foch to
the supreme military command of the Allied forces in France. I
remember passing Doullens in 1917, dipping down into the hollow,
climbing out of it again on to the wide upland leading to Amiens, and
idly noticing the picturesqueness of the place. But there must be a
house and a room in Doullens, which ought already to be marked as
national property, and will certainly be an object of travel in years
to come for both English and French; no less than that factory to the
west of Verdun where Castelnau and Petain conferred at the sharpest
crisis of the immortal siege. For there--so it is generally
believed--the practical