"It will be at least another hour, sir," said a sergeant in answer to my enquiry. So there was nothing for it but to curb my impatience and wait, and I stood my apparatus down and watched the proceedings.
At that moment a car came to a standstill alongside me.
"What's wrong?" called out one of the occupants.
"Broken bridge," I said. "I'm waiting to cross with my car to get films of the villages and the occupants."
"That's good," said the speaker, a captain. "I am going up to them as well. Intelligence I heard from our airmen this morning that they saw civilians in one or two villages a few miles out—so I'm off to investigate. Would you care to come? We shall be the first there."
"Yes, rather," I replied. "It will be a fine scoop for me to film the first meeting of British troops in the liberated villages. I will follow in my car."
The bridge was again complete, so, dumping my camera aboard, I followed in the wake of the captain. Up the hill we dashed and spun along the road at the top, passing beyond the outskirts of Brie. We were now beyond the extreme limit of the shelling which we had subjected the Germans to during their months of occupation.
I was now beginning to see the sights and view the atrocious system and regularity of wilful destruction which had obviously been planned months before by the Huns to carry out Hindenburg's orders and make the whole land a desert. Not a tree was standing; whole orchards were hewn down; every fruit tree and bush was destroyed; hedges were cut at the base as if with a razor; even those surrounding cemeteries were treated in the same way. Agricultural implements were smashed. Mons en Chaussée was the first village we entered; every house was a blackened smoking ruin, and where the fiends had not done their work with fire they had brought dynamite to their aid; whole blocks of buildings had been blown into the air; there was not sufficient cover for a dog.