The Army did not know when it began its advance that the familiar ruins of old villages were being left behind for good, that Berles au Bois with its growing graveyard and ruined church was placed finally behind, Monchy, Blairville, Hamelincourt, St. Leger, Bullecourt, Ecoust, behind for ever, that Albert, Maricourt, Bapaume, re-conquered Peronne, were all permanently held and soon to be left far in obscurity in the rear. It is strange to come back over this track again and see the site of hideous and monstrous latrines now overgrown with rankest weeds, to see the ruined barns all re-roofed, to see the dank acre into which, wrapped in the flag, your comrades were lowered down, to see what was left of the village church of Berles now brought flat because as it stood it was a menace, to see the place where but for the grace of God you might yourself be lying with a cross above your head, to see Monchy lifting itself with great difficulty from its sunken blocks of stone, to listen to the stillness and deadness of old lifeless ruins, to cross the stubble fields to Adinfer and hear the petrol plough methodically scouring the old lines, to approach once more the dreadfulness of Ayette. The villagers have come back to the craters of death. There is an estaminet where was nothing before; there are salvage-made huts with "baby-elephant" roofs built o'er spots where for days lay the dead in a torture of wire. A family is in the estaminet, it was divided into five parts by the war--five members of the family each in a different place and none of them in touch with any other, each believing the other four dead, two in different parts of Germany, one in Paris, one in Belgium, one in the Pyrenees. They are poor people, touched by their suffering to tenderness and generosity, and when there comes to them one who served as a soldier in the war they spread their best before him and do not want to take money for it--wonderful for France. But the people who have suffered are the best people there as elsewhere.