The motor-bus in war - A. M. Beatson

To reach Bapaume from Albert there is a long, straight road, which, from strategical importance, must almost equal that wonderful road from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun. The latter has come to be known as "La Voie sacrée" and General Pétain is said to have stated that the battle of Verdun was largely won by the prowess of the motor drivers along it, during those months when there passed over it a never-ending, continuous line of convoys, transporting munitions and rations to the defenders of France's most famous outpost.

The Albert-Bapaume road presented many points of interest. A few kilometres along it is Pozières, the name of a village which formerly existed here. Now it is indicated only by a signboard announcing the fact.

To the left are such places as Ovillers, Thiepval, Courcelette—names which recall bloody combats of a few months ago. Like Pozières, nothing now remains of them. A little further along one strikes Le Sars. There are indications here of what was once a village and a wood. Now the wood looks like a skeleton and the ground is littered with bricks and odd pieces of timber. On either side of the road the ground is literally studded with shell holes; not a solitary square yard of it has escaped: everywhere are broken-down dug-outs, old artillery emplacements, and irregular and much battered lines of trenches, running seemingly in all directions and difficult to follow. There is not a blade of grass or any sign of life. To leave the road is to meet with quantities of unexploded shells, broken and abandoned equipment, skulls, and corpses of both British and German soldiers. Salvage and burial parties are constantly at work and gradually clearing the ground, a task of some magnitude. Here and there are the little military cemeteries—row after row of long brown mounds of earth, each surmounted by a wooden cross; here and there a smashed-up aeroplane waiting to be salved.

Nowhere is the ghastly aftermath of war more in evidence than around the Butte de Warlencourt, a few miles further along the road. The Butte appears an isolated hill, rising by gradual ascent to a height of about 100 feet. To capture it from the enemy must have been a matter of considerable difficulty. On its summit is a large wooden cross, dedicated to the memory of the gallant officers, N.C.O.'s, and men of the Durham Light Infantry who fell there in November 1916. At various points on the road, particularly, of course, at cross-roads, the Germans before their retreat set mines; these, later exploding, have caused enormous upheavals of earth and craters large enough, many of them, to bury half a dozen motor-lorries in. To let traffic pass them, it has been necessary to circumvent them with causeways built around their lips, until such time as they have been filled in again and the road is once more built up and able to follow its usual course. Eventually appears Bapaume, and the Albert road at this point strikes at right angles the road which, to the left, proceeds to Arras, and to the right into the centre of the town, into which converge roads from Cambrai, Douai, and Péronne.

Bapaume itself presents a sight which is at once amazing and tragic. The first thing that strikes the observer is that it is not suffering so much from the effects of artillery bombardment as from the deliberate burning and blowing up of its houses, and chiefly by the fronts having been blown out. Where these have thus been destroyed, the roofs have collapsed into the houses. Almost every building has been demolished in this way; in many cases the grey slate roofs lie complete, warped but intact, over a mass of debris caused by the blowing down of the supporting walls. Most of the furniture from the houses was presumably removed some time ago to furnish German dug-outs; what has not been made use of in this way has been piled up inside the houses, and, after being tarred, set alight. The trees which formerly adorned the main roads have, to a great extent, been sawn off near their stumps, and the trunks lay, till removed by our troops, at right angles across the roads. I take the object of this tree-felling to be threefold. Firstly, to impede advancing troops; secondly, to leave no cover, and thus throw the roads open to aeroplane observation; and thirdly, for the sake of sheer destructiveness. The third is an undeniable reason, for even the little fruit and rose trees in cottage gardens had not been spared at the hands of the Hun.

The wells everywhere had been poisoned with arsenic or fouled with manure. In Bapaume itself the cleanest well was found to contain eight German corpses. To appreciate the "wanton and cruel spirit," as Mr. Ian Malcolm so aptly describes the spirit in which the Germans are losing the war, I quote in full a letter from him which appeared in The Times on April 7th, 1917. Comment would be superfluous. I can only add that, judging from the devastation, the Hun soldiers must have carried out their orders with a thoroughness which is typical of German organization, except, of course, in such places from which their hurried evacuation did not give them time. The following is the letter:—