In the thirty miles from Amiens to Péronne the Somme runs from east to west in a narrow valley, with eight immense double bends round spurs which project alternately from the higher country (some 200 feet above the river-level) on the north and south. The main road eastwards from Amiens lies south of the river, and rises gradually to the higher level at Villers Bretonneux, about ten miles from the city, and then continues dead straight and nearly level, till it drops again at Brie (twenty-nine miles from Amiens), to the Somme valley, after the river has taken its sharp bend to the south at Péronne, which is four miles north of Brie. As one goes eastwards from Amiens the route becomes more and more war-worn. At first the ordinary avenues of trees still stand, farther on the trees become fewer and fewer, and finally disappear entirely (Plate 51), and a region of total destruction is reached, where only rough indications remain of the sites of the villages. But in 1919 I found German prisoners at work filling up shell-holes (the French and ourselves did not make prisoners dig front-line trenches), levelling the ground, and clearing up generally, and some reoccupation of land had already started, peasants and "store"-keepers living in such temporary bungalows as they could construct. Somehow or other the owners of different strips of land along the road seemed to have discovered which particular strip belonged to each one, ploughing was already going on, and cultivation had been started in quite a number of places. The river itself lies always too low down in its valley to be visible from the road, from which the view to the north looks right over to the high ground between the Somme and the Ancre. The Avre, coming from Montdidier and Moreuil in the south, falls into the Somme close to Amiens, and the Ancre, coming from Albert in the north, joins the main river at Corbie, four miles north of Villers Bretonneux. Albert is about eighteen miles north-east of Amiens by a straight road through Pont Noyelles, which continues to Bapaume, eleven miles farther. On the high ground between the Ancre and the Albert-Bapaume road stood Thiepval and the German redoubts, and on the Bapaume road itself Pozières, Courcelette, and Warlencourt.