Beast-like around us roar the guns. Lightnings flicker through the haze. A line of skeleton trees jags the horizon--Delville Wood. To the West vague clouds of smoke from camp fires, vague heaps of bricks. This is all that we can call Mametz and Montauban. A sausage balloon rises jerkily--over there, towards Maricourt. One cannot speak these names with a steady voice. They are the foretaste of Freedom. And it is here, in the Land of Mines, that the foundations of Victory have been laid. CHAPTER V. THE MENACE OF THE GOLDEN VIRGIN. I have now to tell of the reconquered ground, and I own that the description, which I cannot claim to have invented, more nearly than any other suggests the reality. Indeed, there are not in the French language, nor can there be in any other, for the imagination cannot conceive such things, any words that can give a just idea of so much wretchedness and desolation. So I have thought a score of times, while, during these last days, I have been making my way over the plateau which lies between the Ancre and the Somme, a quite narrow section of the battle front. What would be my difficulty had I to describe the land that the French have retaken! We had set out on our pilgrimage from Albert. "Albert! That's an old story--ancient history. Tell us about something else," say those who look for new sensations. Not so. We may not yet forget Albert, that ruined outpost of Picardy, for her sufferings are not ended. Within the last few days the Boches bombarded her from an immense distance. They only succeeded in knocking over ruins, since all is ruin at Albert, but "if one can't get thrushes one eats blackbirds," eh, friend Fritz? "Well, Mother So-and-So," said an old fellow to an old dame the other morning in a street in Amiens, "when do you think the folks will get back into Albert?" "Indeed, Father Such-and-Such, you know that as well as I do. When the Golden Virgin falls." For a superstition runs in this country that the war will be near its end when the Golden Virgin, who hangs suspended--by what miracle?--between Heaven and Earth, from the top of the belfry of Albert, shall fall to break in pieces upon the ground. But the trouble is that the Virgin "holds on." From Albert to Fricourt, going via Bécordel-Bécourt, the road is hardly 1-1/2 miles long. By this way one skirts in an almost straight line the South-western slopes of the plateau. A few steps beyond the German line that was taken on the 1st July, and we are in Fricourt. You will look a long time in the guide-books that were held in esteem before the war ere you will find the smallest mention of Fricourt. Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban, Contalmaison and a dozen other villages that now can never be forgotten, did not exist for the tourist. He got on most happily without them.