Over this area for a distance of miles the Canadian corps had planted its camps as the line moved forward in front. Along the roads which cross in all directions one could read the sign-posts of the regiments pointing the way to collections of Nissen huts and smaller wooden structures. Here, too, were defensive trenches and strong redoubts prepared for the reception of the enemy in the event of a German advance. One could easily imagine how busy this scene had been in the summer and autumn of 1917 when the Canadian corps were encamped hereabouts. But on the March evening when I saw it, it was bleak and cheerless beyond the power of words to express. The tide of war had flowed past and left the wrecked countryside vacant—the huts empty and the camps abandoned save for, here and there, a handful of men engaged in salvage work; the roadways, once swarming with life, deserted and silent! Over all desolation and loneliness rested like a pall; everywhere the wreckage of battle, the debris of destruction; everywhere the sense of man’s mortality! A grim and melancholy expanse; yet withal holy ground, for here men by the tens of thousands died for mankind! *CHAPTER III* *THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION* Wherever in our flying trip we touched the border line between the actual battlefields and the secondary districts of the war—as for instance Amiens and Valenciennes—we saw human life finding its way into normal channels; but over the areas of continued and desperate fighting there was still the abomination of desolation. Here in the very centre of an ancient populous civilization there stretches for miles in every direction a wilderness—not the empty loneliness of a new land awaiting the inflowing of human life, but a man-made desert speaking of the ruthless savagery of man in the sway of his passions. Here there are ruined farmsteads, vanished villages, once fair forests shredded into pulp, huge piles of debris marking the site of storied cities, destroyed temples—and hardly a sign of human life except the last dribbles of the great tide of uniformed men that once poured over these highways. Thus an afternoon drive from Arras to Cambrai was through a profound silence. Here was a wide highway running straight between two famous French cities through the heart of an ancient land. In the whole distance we met only two or three military cars engaged in the aftermath of war; and a few small working parties of "Chinks" thousands of miles from their native Manchuria. Standing on the motor’s seat, one looked north and south, east and west to the skyline. Everywhere silence, profound, brooding, fateful! Not a curling smoke-wreath on the horizon bespoke a human habitation. The country is open, rolling upland—in its physical conformation it seemed to me almost the counterpart of southern central Manitoba as it was 30-odd years ago before the industry of man dotted it with thriving farmsteads.