itish airmen were on bombing flights over
railway stations and rest-billets and highroads down which the German
troops came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the valley between Irles
and Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, and many other places on the
lines of route.

German soldiers arriving one morning at Cambrai by train found
themselves under the fire of a single airplane which flew very low and
dropped bombs. They exploded with heavy crashes, and one bomb hit the
first carriage behind the engine, killing and wounding several men. A
second bomb hit the station buildings, and there was a clatter of broken
glass, the rending of wood, and the fall of bricks. All lights went out,
and the German soldiers groped about in the darkness amid the splinters
of glass and the fallen bricks, searching for the wounded by the sound
of their groans. It was but one scene along the way to that blood-bath
through which they had to wade to the trenches of the Somme.

Flights of British airplanes circled over the villages on the way. At
Grevilliers, in August, eleven 112-16 bombs fell in the market square,
so that the center of the village collapsed in a state of ruin, burying
soldiers billeted there. Every day the British airmen paid these visits,
meeting the Germans far up the roads on their way to the Somme, and
swooping over them like a flying death. Even on the march in open
country the German soldiers tramping silently along--not singing in
spite of orders--were bombed and shot at by these British aviators,
who flew down very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun bullets. The
Germans lost their nerve at such times, and scattered into the ditches,
falling over one another, struck and cursed by their Unteroffizieren,
and leaving their dead and wounded in the roadway.

As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were choked with
the traffic of war, with artillery and transport wagons and horse
ambulances, and always thousands of gray men marching up to the lines,
or back from them, exhausted and broken after many days in the fires of
hell up there. Officers sat on their horses by the roadside, directing
all the traffic with the usual swearing and cursing, and rode alongside
the transport wagons and the troops, urging them forward at a quicker
pace because of stern orders received from headquarters demanding
quicker movement. The reserves, it seemed, were desperately wanted up in
the lines. The English were attacking again