took it; but we knew you would come back again. You had to do so. So
here I am."

Parts of the line were deserted, except by the dead. In one place the
stores which had been buried by the Canadians before they left were
still there, untouched by the enemy. Our bombardment had made it
impossible for his troops to consolidate their position and to hold the
line steady.

They had just taken cover in the old bits of trench, in shell-holes and
craters, and behind scattered sand-bags, and had been pounded there. The
Canadians were back again.

PART FIVE. THE HEART OF A CITY

AMIENS IN TIME OF WAR

I

During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of
progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was
the capital of the British army. When the battles began in July of that
year it was only a short distance away from the fighting-lines; near
enough to hear the incessant roar of gun-fire on the French front and
ours, and near enough to get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than thirty
minutes, to places where men were being killed or maimed or blinded
in the routine of the day's work. One went out past Amiens station and
across a little stone bridge which afterward, in the enemy's advance
of 1918, became the mark for German high velocities along the road to
Querrieux, where Rawlinson had his headquarters of the Fourth Army in
an old chateau with pleasant meadows round it and a stream meandering
through fields of buttercups in summer-time. Beyond the dusty village
of Querrieux with its white cottages, from which the plaster fell off
in blotches as the war went on, we went along the straight highroad to
Albert, through the long and straggling village of Lahoussoye, where
Scottish soldiers in reserve lounged about among frowsy peasant women
and played solemn games with "the bairns"; and so, past camps and
hutments on each side of the road, to the ugly red-brick town where the
Golden Virgin hung head downward from the broken tower of the church
with her Babe outstretched above the fields of death as though as a
peace-offering to this world at war.

One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men blown to bits there
the clay after the battles of the Somme began. It was in the road
that turned to the right, past the square to go to Meaulte and on to
Fricourt. There was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road,
bringing up new ammunition for the guns that were firing wit