I was now beginning to see the sights and view the atrocious system and regularity of wilful destruction which had obviously been planned months before by the Huns to carry out Hindenburg's orders and make the whole land a desert. Not a tree was standing; whole orchards were hewn down; every fruit tree and bush was destroyed; hedges were cut at the base as if with a razor; even those surrounding cemeteries were treated in the same way. Agricultural implements were smashed. Mons en Chaussée was the first village we entered; every house was a blackened smoking ruin, and where the fiends had not done their work with fire they had brought dynamite to their aid; whole blocks of buildings had been blown into the air; there was not sufficient cover for a dog. The car suddenly came to a standstill; my driver jammed on his brake and I hurried forward. There, at the middle of the village cross-roads was another enormous mine-crater--one hundred feet across by about sixty feet deep. It was quite impassable, but the sight which astounded me was to see about twenty old women and children running up the road the other side of the crater shouting and waving their arms with joy. "Les Anglais! Les Anglais!" they yelled. I got my camera into position and filmed the captain and his companions as they clambered round the jagged lip of the crater and were embraced by the excited people. For the first time since their captivity by the Germans they had seen "les Anglais." Liberators and captives met! Several scenes I filmed of the enormous crater and of the cut-down fruit trees. Not a single tree, old or young, was left standing. To blow up roads, and hew down telegraph poles was war, and such measures are justified; but to destroy every tree or bush that could possibly bear fruit, wilfully to smash up agricultural implements; to shoot a dog and tie a label to its poor body written in English: "Tommies, don't forget to put this in your next communique--that we killed one dog. (Signed) THE HUNS." To crucify a cat upon a door and stick a cigar in its mouth, to blow up and poison wells, to desecrate graves, to smash open vaults and rob the corpses which lay there, and then to kick the bones in all directions and use the coffins as cess-pools--these things I have seen with my own eyes. Is this war? It is the work of savages, ghouls, fiends. I wondered where these people had come from and where they had been as the whole village was burnt out. I enquired and found that the Germans, two days before, had cleared the village of its population and distributed them in villages further back, and had then set fire to the place, leaving nothing but a desert behind, and taking with them all the men who could work and many girls in their teens to what fate one may guess. These few villagers had wandered back during the day to gaze upon the wreckage of their homes and arrived just in time to meet us at the crater.