and his roof had started for the German lines. In a neighbouring hut,
reached by a duck board, we had lunch with him and his officers baked
beans and pickles, cakes and maple syrup. The American food, the
American jokes and voices in that environment seemed strange indeed! But
as we smoked and chatted about the friends we had in common, about
political events at home and the changes that were taking place there, it
seemed as if we were in America once more. The English officer listened
and smiled in sympathy, and he remarked, after our reluctant departure,
that America was an extraordinary land.

He directed our chauffeur to Bapaume, across that wilderness which the
Germans had so wantonly made in their retreat to the Hindenburg line.
Nothing could have been more dismal than our slow progress in the steady
rain, through the deserted streets of this town. Home after home had
been blasted--their intimate yet harrowing interiors were revealed. The
shops and cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their walls blown
out, but in many cases the signs of the vanished and homeless proprietors
still hung above the doors. I wondered how we should feel in New England
if such an outrage had been done to Boston, for instance, or little
Concord! The church, the great cathedral on its terrace, the bishop's
house, all dynamited, all cold and wet and filthy ruins! It was dismal,
indeed, but scarcely more dismal than that which followed; for at Bapaume
we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme. And I chanced to
remember that the name had first been indelibly impressed on my
consciousness at a comfortable breakfast-table at home, where I sat
looking out on a bright New England garden. In the headlines and columns
of my morning newspaper I had read again and again, during the summer of
1916, of Thiepval and La Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Bois
des Trones. Then they had had a sinister but remote significance; now I
was to see them, or what was left of them!