Produced by Brian Coe, Christopher Wright and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) YPRES TO VERDUN COUNTRY [Illustration] LIFE _First published in 1921._ YPRES TO VERDUN A Collection of Photographs of THE WAR AREAS IN FRANCE & FLANDERS Specially taken by SIR ALEXANDER B. W. KENNEDY LL.D., F.R.S. Past President of the Institution of Civil Engineers Associate Member of the Ordnance Committee, etc. LONDON: Published at the Offices of "Country Life," Ltd., Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, W.C. 2, and by George Newnes, Ltd., Southampton Street, Strand, W.C. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons "Quand pensez-vous que la guerre sera finie?" dit le Docteur. "Quand nous serons vainqueurs," coupa le Général. "_Les Silences du Col. Bramble._"--MAUROIS. PREFACE An official visit to the Front during the great days of October, 1918, when our chief difficulty and our great object was to keep up with the retreating Germans, gave me some first-hand knowledge of the devastation of the country which had been the result of four years of war. Familiar--too familiar--as this was to our soldiers, we at home--if I may take myself as a fair example of the average man--could really form no idea, even from the most vivid of the correspondents' descriptions, of what the ruined country was actually like. Roads, fields, orchards, were a featureless waste of shell-holes, often already covered with rank herbage altogether disguising their original nature. Villages were only recognisable by painted notices, "This is Givenchy," or sometimes "This _was_ Givenchy"; not a house, not a wall, not a gate-post to show where they had been. Large towns like Ypres or Lens or Albert were little more than piles of brick, stone, and timber rubbish, through which roads were being cleared between immense piles of débris. In Rheims nearly as many houses were destroyed as the 13,000 said to have been burnt in the Great Fire of London, and smaller places like Soissons or Cambrai or Arras had suffered terribly. It was forbidden in our Army Areas at that time, no doubt for excellent reasons, to use a camera, but I made up my mind that when permission could be obtained I would do my best to secure some permanent record of what had happened.