A bewildering three weeks spent in a perpetually changing
scene--changing, and yet, outside Paris, in its essential elements
terribly the same--that is how my third journey to France, since the
war began, appears to me as I look back upon it. My dear
daughter-secretary and I have motored during January some nine hundred
miles through the length and breadth of France, some of it in severe
weather. We have spent some seven days on the British front, about the
same on the French front, with a couple of nights at Metz, and a
similar time at Strasburg, and rather more than a week in Paris.
Little enough! But what a time of crowding and indelible impressions!
Now, sitting in this quiet London house, I seem to be still bending
forward in the motor-car, which became a sort of home to us, looking
out, so intently that one's eyes suffered, at the unrolling scene. I
still see the grim desolation of the Ypres salient; the heaps of ugly
wreck that men call Lens and Lieviny and Souchez; and that long line
of Notre Dame de Lorette, with the Bois de Bouvigny to the west of
it--where I stood among Canadian batteries just six weeks before the
battle of Arras in 1917. The lamentable ruin of once beautiful Arras,
the desolation of Douai, and the villages between it and Valenciennes,
the wanton destruction of what was once the heart of Cambrai, and that
grim scene of the broken bridge on the Cambrai--Bapaume road, over the
Canal du Nord, where we got out on a sombre afternoon, to look and
look again at a landscape that will be famous through the world for
generations: they rise again, with the sharpness of no ordinary
recollection, on the inward vision. So too Bourlon Wood, high and dark
against the evening sky; the unspeakable desolation and ruin of the
road thence to Bapaume; Bapaume itself, under the moon, its poor
huddled heaps lit only, as we walked about it, by that strange,
tranquil light from overhead, and the lamps of our standing motor-car;