_Wednesday, March 27._--The enemy has not made further advances on a big
scale between the Arras-Bapaume road on the left of the battlefront and
the village of Bray, on the Somme, but has paused in his massed attacks
in order to reorganize his line and bring up artillery.
There are heavy concentrations of German storm troops behind Maurepas,
Ginchy, and Beugnatre, and the roads around Bapaume have been crowded
with men and guns and transport passing down through Le Sars, with
German cavalry along the Bapaume-Gudecourt road and a steady drift
downward to the town of Albert.
That poor, stricken city of the golden Virgin, head downward, with her
babe in her outstretched arms, which I described so often in accounts of
the battles of the Somme in 1916, when that falling statue was lit up by
shellfire, was yesterday in the centre of the fighting north of the
Somme. [The golden Virgin and tower were destroyed later.] The night
before their assault yesterday they bombed it heavily from the air,
using the brilliant moonlight, which lay white over all the battlefields
and these roofs, to fly low and pick their targets wherever they saw
men moving or horses tethered.
In several cases it was not men they hit, but women and children who,
when the war seemed to have passed from this place a year ago, crept
back to their homes and built little wooden booths in which they sold
papers and picture postcards to the troops. Now suddenly the war has
flamed over them again and they were caught, before they could escape,
by thunderbolts out of the shining moonlight, terribly clear and
revealing dead horses about the ruined streets.