I'll send you a telegram directly I get across the briny.
And I plead for no "back from the war tea-parties," please!
* * * * *
[Illustration: PERONNE
From BIACHES
A few days after the evacuation. From a distance the place looked almost
intact, as some of the outside walls had been left standing. That white
building in the centre of the town was once the cathedral. MONT ST.
QUENTIN on the left. The thin white lines on the slopes beyond are
trenches.]
_March 22._
[Sidenote: THE HUN RETREAT]
The Hun rearguards are now well beyond ----. I knew the place so
intimately from photographs, and from high up in the air, that a view of
it from terra-firma promised to be quite interesting.
So with great eagerness, some sandwiches, and the faithful sketchbook, I
sallied forth. Harry came, too. A glorious day of brilliant sun and
brief snowstorms.
From the aerodrome through all this devastated country, past wrecked
villages, orchards laid waste, dug-out camps, bivouac camps, R.E. dumps,
light railways, battered trollies lying on their sides, and all the ugly
confusion of old wire rusted a red-hot colour, bits of corrugated iron,
bits of netting screens, more wire, dead horses, dead men in all stages
of decomposition, legs, hands, heads scattered anywhere, dead trees,
mud, broken rifles, gas-bags, tin helmets, bully-beef tins, derelict
trenches, derelict telephone wires, grenades, aerial torpedoes, all the
toys of war, broken and useless. Tommy, the dear hairies, and the R.E.
dumps, to remind you what vast stores of everything are still being
accumulated.
The ground becomes more and more like boiling porridge as you approach
no-man's-land. Of no-man's-land itself, perhaps, the less said the
better. No-beast's-land--call it that rather. And yet men have been very
brave, very tender, in no-man's-land. Next we come to those Hun trenches
that I have peered at from a distance so long and mapped so often. It
all seems rather futile now.
Past the support trenches. Past the second line. Damn it! how much
larger and deeper that old emplacement is than I thought! The country is
less pitted, too. Of course, it hasn't been fought over like our back
areas. Why; here are trees scarcely knocked about at all. A recognizable
field there. How real that stream looks! And, oh Jemima! a blue tit.
A little distance farther. Over that gentle rise, and there behold ----.
Surely one of the loveliest towns in France, on its low hill surrounded
by the quiet waters of the Somme. From a distance it looks all right;
though somehow, the smoke still ascending from it doesn't look natural.
As you approach you realize that what looks so charming is just
empty, shelled, charred, and broken. The Huns have destroyed every
single house, all the bridges, and the cathedral, too. The cathedral
that once crowned the town now stands a pale crushed ghost in the
deserted market-place.
[Sidenote: PERONNE]
Some of the streets are almost amusing. Imagine Rye with the pretty
alleys so encumbered and piled up with roofs, sofas, the contents of
wardrobes, dormer-windows, smashed mirrors, rubble, and dust, that it's
quite impossible to proceed. Very well, that's ----.
Go into the houses, and there it's just as it is in the streets.
Everything crushed to atoms. Images of saints have been hurled out on to
garbage-heaps, and in the cathedral huge pillars are lying about in
clumsy confusion amongst chairs, organ pipes, and gilded flowers.
On a huge notice board in the Grande Place the Hun has written: