some dim shapes and sights emerging on the long and thrice-famous road
from Bapaume to Albert, first, the dark mound of the Butte de
Warlencourt, with three white crosses on its top, and once a
mysterious light in a fragment of a ruined house, the only light I saw
on the whole long downward stretch from Bapaume to Albert. Then the
church of Albert, where the hanging Virgin used to be in 1917,
hovering above a town that for all the damage done to it was then
still a town of living men, and is now a place so desolate that one
shrinks from one's own voice in the solitude, and so wrecked that only
the traffic directions here and there, writ large, seem to guide us
through the shapeless heaps that once were streets. And, finally, the
scanty lights of Amiens, marking the end of the first part of our
journey.

These were the sights of the first half of our journey. And as they
recur to me, I understand so well the anxious and embittered mood of
France, which was so evident a month ago;[2] though now, I hope,
substantially changed by the conditions of the renewed Armistice. No
one who has not seen with his or her own eyes the situation in
Northern France can, it seems to me, realise its effects on the
national feeling of the country. And in this third journey of mine, I
have seen much more than Northern France. In a motor drive of some
hundreds of miles, from Metz to Strasburg, through Nancy, Toul, St.
Mihiel, Verdun, Châlons, over the ghastly battle-fields of Champagne,
through Rheims, Chateau-Thierry, Vaux, to Paris, I have always had the
same spectacle under my eyes, the same passion in my heart. If one
tried to catch and summarise the sort of suppressed debate that was
going on round one, a few weeks ago, between Allied opinion that was
trying to reassure France, and the bitter feeling of France herself,
it seemed to fall into something like the following dialogue: