Germans had retired. The first sign was
a huge shell-crater in the middle of the road, about forty feet deep,
which the Boche had arranged to prevent armoured cars from following
him up. If they did succeed, the transports would be delayed in
reaching them, at all events. These holes were rather a nuisance, for
the road itself was a mass of lesser shell-craters and the soft ground
on each side was impassable. The road was crowded with engineers and
labor battalions, filling in the shell-holes, and laying railways into
the outskirts of A----.

In A---- the old German notices were still standing as they had been
left. Strung across the road on a wire was a notice which read:
"Fuhrweg nach Behagnies." Every house in the town had been pulled
down. The wily Boche had not even blown them up. Instead he had saved
explosives by attaching steel hawsers to the houses and by means of
tractors had pulled them down, so that the roof and sides fell in on
the foundation. Every pump handle in the village had been broken off
short, and not a single piece of furniture was left behind. Later, we
found the furniture from this and other villages in the Hindenburg
Line.

Saddest of all, however, was the destruction of the beautiful poplar
trees which once bordered the long French roads built by Napoleon.
These had been sawn off at their base and allowed to fall on the side
of the road, not across it, as one might suppose. If they had been
allowed to fall across the road, the Boche, himself, would have been
hindered in his last preparations for his retreat. Everything was done
with military ends in view. The villages were left in such a condition
as to make them uninhabitable, the more to add to our discomfort and
to make our hardships severer. The trees were cut down only on those
parts of the road which were screened from observation from his
balloons and present trenches. In some places where the road dipped
into a valley the trees had been left untouched.

At the place where our tanks were scheduled to arrive, and which had
lately been a railhead of the Boche, all the metals had been torn up,
and in order to destroy the station itself, he had smashed the
cast-iron pillars which supported the roof, and in consequence the
whole building had fallen in. But nothing daunted, the British
engineers were even now working at top speed laying down new lines.
Some of the metals, which a few short weeks before had been lying in
countless stacks