[28] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, vol. vi., p. 30.
Villers Bretonneux had been throughout in our possession, but only its ruins were standing, the one "hotel" which I found there in 1919 being a tarpaulin-covered shed (Plate 61) calling itself the "Hôtel des Trois Moineaux," and bearing a cryptic message from "Toto" which I am unable to explain. The first day's advance swept far beyond Warfusée, just south of which the village of Marcelcave was captured by a tank whose Lieutenant demanded--and obtained--a receipt from the Australians before he would hand over his spoils to them. Abreast of Foucaucourt (Plate 52) and between it and the Somme lies Chuignes, where the Australian advance captured a 380-mm. gun on an elaborate emplacement, which had been put in position, but I believe too late to be used, for the purpose of a long-range bombardment of Amiens. The gun was dismantled before we reached it, and lies on the ground shorn of some 10 feet of its muzzle end, which had been cut off by its captors to send home as a "souvenir."
The Chipilly spur (Plate 62), north of Warfusée on the north side of the river, caused some heavy fighting, but was taken by the Londoners on the second day of the advance, with the help of two companies of Americans who are said to have lost touch with their own division and to have been quite ready to lend a hand in any fighting that was going on. The photograph gives some idea of the river itself at a place where it is navigable over a great breadth. Cappy (Plate 63) is a little farther upstream, where the river has divided itself into various channels, the particular one seen being the navigable canal, the rest of the river spreading over a quarter of a mile of marsh land to the north bank.
The land beside the Amiens-Péronne road becomes more and more ruined as one goes eastwards. Plate 51 shows something of what the actual road looks like, but no picture can indicate the state of the land itself, the country that was once fertile fields and farms. On my last visit (early in 1920) it was pleasant, but pathetic, to see that many peasants had somehow been able to find out which strip had been theirs before the war, and had built themselves hutments--they could hardly be called houses--in which they could at any rate live beside the land which they loved and which they are trying once more to cultivate. Towards Villers Carbonnel the countryside shows itself as more and more destroyed. Plate 64 (an officially taken photograph) indicates the appearance of that village immediately after we passed through it in 1918 and before the clearing-up work had commenced. A little later the broken woodwork would be collected for firing and the bricks from the fallen walls (if enough were left) would be trimmed and stacked ready for use again in making such dwellings as will anyhow make it possible for the peasants to get back again. In France they do not wait for trade union permissions, or "skilled" labour, or the sanitary (and other) regulations of County Councils, but go straight ahead and build. It seems certainly the best way of getting houses.