The mud, our chief enemy, made active operations impossible for a time. It was an even worse enemy than the Germans. General Haig says[25] that the trenches were channels of deep mud and the roads almost impassable, making all problems of supply most serious. General Maurice calls it, later on, a "morass of stinking mud." We were, in fact, at that time--and at other times as well--fighting the elements as well as the Germans. On the 17th of March, 1917, however (after the Warlencourt Ridge had been carried), Bapaume itself, which had been systematically destroyed by the Germans before they evacuated it, was at last entered. [25] Despatches, p. 47. Bapaume in 1919 was, like Albert, being rapidly reinhabited, and the new buildings (perhaps due to their being closer to the main road) were more in evidence than in most other places. The villages north of Bapaume on the Arras road (Behagnies, Ervillers, and others) are, like those nearer the Somme, practically wiped out. But here, also, peasants and small shopkeepers were returning "home," and sheltering themselves as best they could in some sort of hutments. On the 17th of March, 1917, also, the Germans having just commenced their great retirement, Mont St. Quentin was taken, and the next day Péronne itself. Plate 58 shows the dry bed of the Nord Canal where the road crosses it just at the rise on the back (north) of Mont St. Quentin. Plate 59 shows the ruin of the Church of St. Jean at Péronne. The little town itself, originally of about 5,000 inhabitants, was in parts systematically burnt and destroyed by mines by the Germans before they evacuated it in 1917, and further damaged by Franco-British shell-fire in 1918. On the spot I was told that the great church had been among the buildings deliberately burnt by the Germans; in any case it is now, like the rest of the town, a mere ruin. The outrages perpetrated by the Germans in their masterly retreat in 1917 extended across the whole area of the retirement (see Plate 119), and have been sufficiently described, so far as it has been possible in any decent paper to describe them. But the burnt and shattered houses were not the matters, bad as they were, which caused the intense feeling of loathing in addition to anger among the French, when they were at last able to return to their desecrated homes.