Leaving the hill, the King and his party proceeded by car in the direction of Albert, going through the mining villages, still mostly ruins, but busy now again with useful industry. The route followed passed such well-known places as Souchez and Mont St. Eloy. The day being a crowded one, there was no time to stop in the ruined town of Arras, but with the thought which characterized all the arrangements which the French had made, the Prefect had detailed a guard of cyclists to meet the cars at the entrance to the town. They conducted the King's car through Arras, passing all the chief points in the town which had suffered from the enemy's fire. From thence the King went on to Bapaume, Warlencourt, and Le Sars, seeing again the Somme battle-field, the scene of the first great British offensive attack in the summer of 1916. It was there the New Armies were put to the crucial test and proved that they were worthy to take up and guard the tradition of the old Regular Army. In many hundreds of thousands of British homes to-day the Battle of the Somme is the greatest memory of the campaign, for it marked the end of the wearisome trench war, the first move to drive the enemy from out of the land he had invaded, though he had made of it, as he thought, an invincible fortress. They can remember the joy they had in the heartening roar of our guns as they prepared the attack, the multitudinous clamour of the field guns, the sharp scream of the 12-inch guns which reared their monstrous throats by street corners of Albert, the deep note, as of a giant's cough, of the 15-inch howitzers, pushing out shells as big almost as mines. Bitter was the fighting on the Somme, most bitter when in moving to the attack the infantry encountered rain and the chalky downs became as grease under their feet. But there was the exultant feeling of advancing, of winning back day by day a little bit of France. The Somme heartened the British soldier with the knowledge that impregnableness had lost its meaning, heartened them, too, with the knowledge that our Air Force had won supremacy in the air, and now could blind the enemy at will by driving his aeroplanes and observation balloons out of the sky. Passing by several cemeteries and battle exploit memorials erected by both home and Dominion units, the party reached Albert, from the ruined cathedral tower of which a great statue of the Virgin and Child hung perilously through years of the war. It was said that, when it fell, the war would end; and in truth it did not fall until the end was near. A halt at Albert had not been arranged, but the King, noting a party of workers of the War Graves Commission in a camp there, stopped and talked with the men. The afternoon was occupied in visiting cemeteries in the surrounding districts. * * * * * For the Somme victories we paid heavy price, as the crowding Somme cemeteries show. The King visited of these:--