West of Cambrai and south to St. Quentin lay over thirty miles of the strongest part of the Hindenburg Line, that "granite wall of 24,000 square kilometres." The southern end of the much-talked-of "Switch Line" at Quéant, ten miles west of Cambrai, had been forced by the First and Third Armies on the 2nd of September, 1918, but the defence was still strong, and it was only on the 10th of October that I was greeted, on arriving at Colonel Gill's quarters, with the welcome news that Cambrai had just fallen. Two days later I was able to visit the city. The central part (Plate 79) was still burning, having been fired by the Germans on their evacuation, but it was possible to get round by the suburbs; only an occasional shell still reached the town. (It is hardly necessary to say that the photograph, taken many months later, shows the Place d'Armes only after it had been cleared up, and not in the state in which it was when the city was entered.) The railway-station was destroyed, the windows of most houses had disappeared, and walls were cracked everywhere. But on the whole the destruction (obviously largely due to bombing as well as shell-fire) was not nearly so complete or so irreparable as at Rheims or Ypres or Lens. The tower of the cathedral (Plate 80), a church rebuilt about sixty years ago, looks as if it could hardly stand permanently. There were many houses in the suburbs which, although much damaged, could be made habitable without very serious difficulty. But it is to be remembered that the wanton destruction of household property, down to the very toys of the children, must have caused the returning inhabitants here and in many other places even more intense feeling about the invaders than the mere destruction of the houses themselves, which had come to be recognised as an inevitable consequence of the state of war, and might, in fact, have been caused by combatants on either side. I have before me an airplane plan of Cambrai, which I obtained from the First Army in 1918 and which is an excellent example of the great skill and success we had obtained in aerial surveys. As it is printed it is very nearly a map on a scale of 6 inches to the mile, although it is a mosaic of prints from eight or nine different negatives, taken, as the direction of the shadows shows, at at least four different times. But the joins between the different prints are in many cases invisible, and the map as a whole only wants the names of the streets to make it complete.