Bapaume itself presents a sight which is at once amazing and tragic. The first thing that strikes the observer is that it is not suffering so much from the effects of artillery bombardment as from the deliberate burning and blowing up of its houses, and chiefly by the fronts having been blown out. Where these have thus been destroyed, the roofs have collapsed into the houses. Almost every building has been demolished in this way; in many cases the grey slate roofs lie complete, warped but intact, over a mass of debris caused by the blowing down of the supporting walls. Most of the furniture from the houses was presumably removed some time ago to furnish German dug-outs; what has not been made use of in this way has been piled up inside the houses, and, after being tarred, set alight. The trees which formerly adorned the main roads have, to a great extent, been sawn off near their stumps, and the trunks lay, till removed by our troops, at right angles across the roads. I take the object of this tree-felling to be threefold. Firstly, to impede advancing troops; secondly, to leave no cover, and thus throw the roads open to aeroplane observation; and thirdly, for the sake of sheer destructiveness. The third is an undeniable reason, for even the little fruit and rose trees in cottage gardens had not been spared at the hands of the Hun. The wells everywhere had been poisoned with arsenic or fouled with manure. In Bapaume itself the cleanest well was found to contain eight German corpses. To appreciate the "wanton and cruel spirit," as Mr. Ian Malcolm so aptly describes the spirit in which the Germans are losing the war, I quote in full a letter from him which appeared in _The Times_ on April 7th, 1917. Comment would be superfluous. I can only add that, judging from the devastation, the Hun soldiers must have carried out their orders with a thoroughness which is typical of German organization, except, of course, in such places from which their hurried evacuation did not give them time. The following is the letter:— MORE INHUMAN DOCUMENTS TO THE EDITOR OF _THE TIMES_ SIR,—I enclose herewith two "scraps of paper" taken from German prisoners in the region of Bapaume, where I found myself last Monday. Their contents should, I think, be made known far and wide, for they bear eloquent testimony to the wanton and cruel spirit in which the Germans are losing the war. I will add that, for the time being, the originals are in my possession, and that these translations are faithfully done from the originals. No. 1, dated March 9th, gives instructions for the procedure preliminary to the so-called German "withdrawal" on the British front, and runs as follows:— 1. Pioneer ——, and 1 infantryman will throw dung into the wells. 2. Pioneer ——, and 2 infantrymen will cut down the trees. 3. Pioneer ——, and 2 infantrymen will carry out special tasks.