If on the Somme the anvil
was to some extent escaping from the hammer, in the coming battle of
Arras the hammer was to take its full revenge.
These things, however, were still hidden from all but the few, and in
the first days of March the Germans had not yet begun to retire in front
of the French line further south. The Somme advance was still the centre
of things, and Bapaume had not yet fallen. As we drove on towards Albert
we knew that we should be soon close behind our own guns, and within
range of the enemy's.
No one who has seen it in war-time will ever forget the market-place of
Albert--the colossal heaps of wreck that fill the centre of it; the new,
pretentious church, rising above the heaps, a brick-and-stucco building
of the worst neo-Catholic taste, which has been so gashed and torn and
broken, while still substantially intact, that all its mean and tawdry
ornament has disappeared in a certain strange dignity of ruin; and last,
the hanging Virgin, holding up the Babe above the devastation below, in
dumb protest to God and man.
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