It is not now (after three years of war and many bombardments) an attractive town; probably it never was. It is a small straggling town built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at a point where the swift chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so channeled that it can be used for power. Before the war it contained a few small factories, including one for the making of sewing-machines. Its most important building was a big church built a few years ago, through the energy of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert, a small, probably not very old image, about which strange stories are told. Before the war it was thought that this church would become a northern rival to Lourdes for the working of miraculous cures during the September pilgrimage. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child stood on an iron stalk on the summit of the church tower. During a bombardment of the town at a little after three o'clock in the afternoon of Friday, January 15, 1915, a shell so bent the stalk that the statue bent down over the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of our soldiers will remember Albert for anything except this diving Virgin. Perhaps half of the men engaged in the Battle of the Somme passed underneath her as they marched up to the line, and, glancing up, hoped that she might not come down till they were past. From some one, French or English, a word has gone about that when she does fall the war will end. Others have said that French engineers have so fixed her with wire ropes that she cannot fall. * * * * * From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield of the Somme: 1. In a north-westerly direction to Auchonvillers and Hebuterne. 2. In a northerly direction to Authuille and Hamel. 3. In a north-easterly direction to Pozieres. 4. In an easterly direction to Fricourt and Maricourt. Between the second and the third of these the little river Ancre runs down its broad, flat, well-wooded valley, much of which is a marsh through which the river (and man) have forced more than one channel. This river, which is a swift, clear, chalk stream, sometimes too deep and swift to ford, cuts the English sector of the battlefield into two nearly equal portions. Following the first of the four roads, one passes the wooded village of Martinsart, to the village of Auchonvillers, which lies among a clump of trees upon a ridge or plateau top. The road dips here, but soon rises again, and so, by a flat tableland, to the large village of Hebuterne. Most of this road, with the exception of one little stretch near Auchonvillers, is hidden by high ground from every part of the battlefield. Men moving upon it cannot see the field.