I recall two amusing items in connection with salvage. One was a notice outside an old dug-out which bore the legend, "This dug-out is mined": "To-night’s the Night." The other was a sentence in a letter I was censoring: "I am now doing ’savage’ work in the trenches." The second week of May 1917 found us once more on the move, this time to Péronne. The move itself was an interesting one. Our route lay through Albert, Bray, and Cappy, and we travelled along roads in the Somme Valley which I have written of in a previous chapter—roads on which we had taken convoys as far back as August 1915. when they were at many points under observation of the enemy and in close proximity to the trenches. Thence along the main Amiens-St. Quentin road, the straightest and most tedious road imaginable. Crossing the former lines of trenches and the old No-man’s-land at Estrées, we turned into Péronne. The latter must have been an altogether delightful riverside town, with handsome buildings and broad streets. Now it is ruined, though not so completely as Bapaume. To pass through it one has to cross the Somme about four times, and at each point the original bridge has naturally been destroyed. The other side of Péronne each village has, of course, been systematically destroyed and the trees felled. Even the cemeteries have been desecrated by the removal of corpses from coffins and of tombstones. The Huns have used the coffins and lead shells for their own dead, and even altered the inscriptions on the stones and re-erected them as gravestones for their dead soldiers. In one churchyard a huge family vault shows signs of having been used as a bakehouse. A Frenchman who had lived in one village during its occupation by the Germans said the Hun soldiers told him that their orders were to destroy fruit trees, gardens, graves, and houses, so that, after the German Army had retreated, the civilian population, returning, would be appalled at the wanton destruction of their homes, and, reflecting on the towns and villages ahead still occupied, would collectively revolt and demand terms of peace to be made by France. I conclude this chapter writing in a tent pitched in a fair-sized garden: every fruit tree has been felled, apple and cherry trees lie sawn off two feet or so from the ground. Even so they are covered with blossom. The state of the village—between Péronne and St. Quentin—can be left to the imagination almost: a confused collection of grey slate roofs, burnt timber, loose bricks, and chunks of masonry. The night is dark, but in the distance the sky is red. The Huns have fired the cathedral at St. Quentin! Printed in Great Britain by UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON