These things, however, were still hidden from all but the few, and in the first days of March the Germans had not yet begun to retire in front of the French line further south.  The Somme advance was still the centre of things, and Bapaume had not yet fallen.  As we drove on towards Albert we knew that we should be soon close behind our own guns, and within range of the enemy’s.

No one who has seen it in war-time will ever forget the market-place of Albert—­the colossal heaps of wreck that fill the centre of it; the new, pretentious church, rising above the heaps, a brick-and-stucco building of the worst neo-Catholic taste, which has been so gashed and torn and broken, while still substantially intact, that all its mean and tawdry ornament has disappeared in a certain strange dignity of ruin; and last, the hanging Virgin, holding up the Babe above the devastation below, in dumb protest to God and man.  The gilded statue, which now hangs at right angles to the tower, has, after its original collapse under shell-fire, been fixed in this position by the French Engineers; and it is to be hoped that when the church comes to be rebuilt the figure will be left as it is.  There is something extraordinarily significant and dramatic in its present attitude.  Whatever artistic defects the statue may have are out of sight, and it seems as it hangs there, passionately hovering, above the once busy centre of a prosperous town, to be the very symbol and voice of France calling the world to witness.

A few more minutes, and we are through the town, moving slowly along the Albert-Bapaume road, that famous road which will be a pilgrims’ way for generations to come.

“To other folk,” writes an officer quoted by Mr. Buchan in his Battle of the Somme, “and on the maps, one place seems just like another, I suppose; but to us—­La Boisselle and Ovillers—­my hat!”

To walk about in those hells!  I went along the “sunken road” all the way to Contalmaison.  Talk about sacred ground!  The new troops coming up now go barging across in the most light-hearted way.  It means no more to them than the roads behind used to mean to us.  But when I think how we watered every yard of it with blood and sweat!  Children might play there now, if it didn’t look so like the aftermath of an earthquake.  I have a sort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial.

The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter—­so far, at least, as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim scene itself—­held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads and trampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them.  The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the air—­mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in hour by hour.

“The aftermath of an earthquake!” Do the words express the reality before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La Boisselle?  Hardly.  The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes.  It does not tear and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour, till there is nothing left but mud and dust.