[29] Haig's Despatches, p. 270. The Château of Brie (Plate 66) lies on the Somme only half a mile south of the crossing of the main road from Amiens to St. Quentin, and therefore some four miles south of the great bend of the river at Péronne. On the 27th of September, 1918, it was the scene of a wonderful dress rehearsal for the crossing of the Hindenburg Line at the St. Quentin Canal two days later (see p. 58). Rafts, collapsible boats and life-lines, and some of the 3,000 life-belts which had been hurried up from the coast, were all tested, to make sure that there should be neither hesitation nor failure in their use in the attack on the "absolutely impregnable" section. And, as everyone knows, there _was_ neither hesitation nor failure; the St. Quentin Canal was carried by the Terriers on the appointed day, and with this success, and the crossing of the "Kriemhilde" Line by the Americans in the middle of October, the last standing places for the retreating German armies vanished. On the road east of the Somme from Brie to Péronne one saw a curious phenomenon which I seldom saw elsewhere, and cannot explain. In some way the trees in the felled avenue had been able to reassert their life, and for a considerable distance the road was lined in an unsightly fashion with what looked like gigantic bushes growing out of the stumps of the once tall and beautiful trees. I have said nothing in this section as to Amiens itself; it had serious enough troubles, although it was never in the fighting zone, having been evacuated by the Germans after only ten days' occupation in September, 1914. That time, however, was sufficient for a requisition of half a million francs to be enforced, and for a number of civilians to be deported. Some parts of the city, including the railway-station, were seriously damaged by bombing and by heavy shells, and the city suffered much from April to June in 1918. The civilian inhabitants left it early in April. Several shells hit the cathedral, and houses within a few yards of it are entirely wrecked, but happily very little damage was done to the structure itself, from which the stained glass had been safely removed. [Illustration: _PLATE LI._ THE SOMME ROAD. _A stretch, close to Villers Carbonnel, of the main road from Amiens towards Brie and Péronne, which lies on the high country above the Somme. What was once the avenue of trees is even here not so entirely destroyed as in many other places._] [Illustration: _PLATE LII._ FOUCAUCOURT. _The remains of a church beside the Somme road._] [Illustration: _PLATE LIII._ MAMETZ. _The village of Mametz has practically disappeared; the immediate foreground covers what had once been cottages; the cottages on the other side have equally disappeared. (The cross is a war memorial.)_] [Illustration: _PLATE LIV._ TRONES WOOD. _Shell-holes, chalk trenches and bare trunks are all that remain of the wood, the trunks much more numerous than in the Ypres Salient._]