machine-guns all the time, but still our men kept on serving the hot tea and cocoa, biscuits, and cigarettes that were so much appreciated by officers and men alike, only leaving their posts and abandoning their hut when ordered to do so by the Military. The retreat from Albert must have been like an awful nightmare. Some of our men in the darkness became entangled in the fallen wires, and whilst trying to extricate themselves heard the hum of an aeroplane just overhead, and a bomb was dropped only a few yards in front of them. [Illustration: THE Y.M.C.A. IN A RUINED WAREHOUSE. SHELL-HOLE IN FLOOR OF CANTEEN] At Bapaume we had several centres in and closely adjacent to the town. Bapaume, like Peronne, was not destroyed by enemy shell-fire, but deliberately wrecked by the Hun before he was forced to evacuate, and the foe we face to-day is a past master in the art of destruction. Hardly a building of any description remained intact in either of these towns when the British entered into occupation. That very fact made us marvel when, standing for the first time in front of the big building occupied by the Y.M.C.A. in Peronne we noticed that it was practically intact. On entering the building we marvelled still more, for the first object we saw was a fine German piano. Surely it was an act of kindness on the part of the wily Hun to leave it for our men. Was it? When the British occupied Peronne a company of troops from the west of England were the first to enter that house. A Tommy who was musical made a bee-line for the piano, but his officer restrained him, bidding him first look inside. It was well he did so, for three powerful bombs were attached to the strings of the piano, and had he touched one of the keys concerned, he himself, the piano, and the building would have been utterly destroyed. In the hut attached to the house a boxing match was taking place on the evening of our arrival, and men had come from outposts miles away to take part. Underneath the house was a German dug-out of almost incredible depth. The original staircase was missing--the Germans having commandeered the wood for the construction of the dug-out--but it had been replaced by an ingenious Y.M.C.A. secretary, who had searched amid the ruins of Peronne until at last he had found another staircase, which, with infinite pains and labour and not a little ingenuity, he had built in to replace the original one. The day before our visit the old lady who had lived in the house before the war paid a visit to her old home. She was a refugee, and had trudged miles to get back to Peronne. She requested permission to dig in the garden and soon unearthed the uniform of her husband who fought against the Germans in 1870. She had buried it there before the fall of the town. Digging again she came across his sword and accoutrements, and deeper still, her silver spoons and other trinkets that she valued. Could anything bring home more clearly the horrors of war? If, instead