Along the Albert-Bapaume road the villages of Pozières and Courcelette have disappeared altogether. Sometimes a big iron gate, or half a gate, or a stone gatepost, shows where an entrance once existed to some more or less pretentious mansion, but the building itself has gone entirely, and its site is grown over with rank herbage, which hides every indication even of where the house once stood. The whole Thiepval plateau is now a wilderness of weedy vegetation, and the weeds seem to have swallowed up the redoubts altogether, as well as Thiepval itself.
The defences on the Upper Ancre still barred the way to Bapaume along the road by Le Sars and the Butte de Warlencourt ([Plate 57]).[24] The Butte was the centre of the German position, as strongly protected by trenches and wire as even the Thiepval plateau itself. Fierce attacks in October and November, 1916, failed to secure it, and the chalky hillock was only finally taken in February, 1917. It now carries five crosses erected in memory of the units which fought there.
The mud, our chief enemy, made active operations impossible for a time. It was an even worse enemy than the Germans. General Haig says[25] that the trenches were channels of deep mud and the roads almost impassable, making all problems of supply most serious. General Maurice calls it, later on, a "morass of stinking mud." We were, in fact, at that time—and at other times as well—fighting the elements as well as the Germans. On the 17th of March, 1917, however (after the Warlencourt Ridge had been carried), Bapaume itself, which had been systematically destroyed by the Germans before they evacuated it, was at last entered.
Bapaume in 1919 was, like Albert, being rapidly reinhabited, and the new buildings (perhaps due to their being closer to the main road) were more in evidence than in most other places.
The villages north of Bapaume on the Arras road (Behagnies, Ervillers, and others) are, like those nearer the Somme, practically wiped out. But here, also, peasants and small shopkeepers were returning "home," and sheltering themselves as best they could in some sort of hutments.
On the 17th of March, 1917, also, the Germans having just commenced their great retirement, Mont St. Quentin was taken, and the next day Péronne itself. [Plate 58] shows the dry bed of the Nord Canal where the road crosses it just at the rise on the back (north) of Mont St. Quentin. [Plate 59] shows the ruin of the Church of St. Jean at Péronne. The little town itself, originally of about 5,000 inhabitants, was in parts systematically burnt and destroyed by mines by the Germans before they evacuated it in 1917, and further damaged by Franco-British shell-fire in 1918. On the spot I was told that the great church had been among the buildings deliberately burnt by the Germans; in any case it is now, like the rest of the town, a mere ruin. The outrages perpetrated by the Germans in their masterly retreat in 1917 extended across the whole area of the retirement (see [Plate 119]), and have been sufficiently described, so far as it has been possible in any decent paper to describe them. But the burnt and shattered houses were not the matters, bad as they were, which caused the intense feeling of loathing in addition to anger among the French, when they were at last able to return to their desecrated homes.
For a year after March, 1917, the Somme area ceased to be fought over, as the German retirement in 1917 had removed them far to the east. A year later the tables were turned, when on the 21st of March Ludendorff's great attack, cleverly directed against our weakest spot, began to drive us back from St. Quentin towards Amiens, and succeeded so rapidly that on the 23rd the Germans were at Péronne and on the 25th near Estrées, three miles east of the Somme on the Amiens road. On the 25th our Allies, on our right, had been compelled to fall back as far as Noyon. At this critical moment there was got together surely the most remarkable auxiliary force that a British General has ever had under his command. General Haig says:
"As the result of a conference on the 25th of March, a mixed force, including details, stragglers, schools personnel, tunnelling companies, army troops companies, field survey companies, and Canadian and American Engineers, had been got together and organised by General Grant, the Chief Engineer to the Fifth Army."[26]
The line on which this "mixed force" was placed passed through Warfusée ([Plate 60]). Some of the men collected were Engineer civilians with no previous training, and no knowledge of rifle-shooting. I have been told that they were pronounced most plucky, "but somewhat dangerous"! In the result, however, they did yeoman service in helping to hold back the onslaught until the distant reserves could arrive and until the attackers had eventually exhausted themselves.