dull to read
about and to see, it was, at least, the old line which kept back the
tide and stood the siege. It was the line from which, after all those
months of war, the tide turned and the besieged became the attackers.

* * * * *

To most of the British soldiers who took part in the Battle of the
Somme, the town of Albert must be a central point in a reckoning of
distances. It lies, roughly speaking, behind the middle of the line of
that battle. It is a knot of roads, so that supports and supplies
could and did move from it to all parts of the line during the battle.
It is on the main road, and on the direct railway line from Amiens. It
is by much the most important town within an easy march of the
battlefield. It will be, quite certainly, the centre from which, in
time to come, travellers will start to see the battlefield where such
deeds were done by men of our race.

It is not now (after three years of war and many bombardments) an
attractive town; probably it never was. It is a small straggling town
built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at a point where the
swift chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so
channeled that it can be used for power. Before the war it contained a
few small factories, including one for the making of sewing-machines.
Its most important building was a big church built a few years ago,
through the energy of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert,
a small, probably not very old image, about which strange stories are
told. Before the war it was thought that this church would become a
northern rival to Lourdes for the working of miraculous cures during
the September pilgrimage. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child
stood on an iron stalk on the summit of the church tower. During a
bombardment of the town at a little after three o'clock in the
afternoon of Friday, January 15, 1915, a shell so bent the stalk that
the statue bent down over the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of
our soldiers will remember Albert for anything except this diving
Virgin. Perhaps half of the men engaged in the Battle of the Somme
passed underneath her as they marched up to the line, and, glancing
up, hoped that she might not come down till they were past. From some
one, French or English, a word has gone about that when she does fall
the war will end. Others have said that French engineers have so fixed
her with wire ropes that she cannot f