The Old Front Line | Page 2

a dip, or to crown a slope, but remains roughly
parallel with ours, from seventy to five hundred yards from it, for miles
and miles, up hill and down dale. All the advantages of position and
observation were in the enemy's hands, not in ours. They took up their
lines when they were strong and our side weak, and in no place in all
the old Somme position is our line better sited than theirs, though in
one or two places the sites are nearly equal. Almost in every part of this
old front our men had to go up hill to attack.
If the description of this old line be dull to read, it should be
remembered that it was dull to hold. The enemy had the lookout posts,
with the fine views over France, and the sense of domination. Our men
were down below with no view of anything but of stronghold after
stronghold, just up above, being made stronger daily. And if the enemy
had strength of position he had also strength of equipment, of men, of
guns, and explosives of all kinds. He had all the advantages for nearly
two years of war, and in all that time our old front line, whether held by
the French or by ourselves, was nothing but a post to be endured, day in
day out, in all weathers and under all fires, in doubt, difficulty, and
danger, with bluff and makeshift and improvisation, till the tide could
be turned. If it be dull to read about and to see, it was, at least, the old
line which kept back the tide and stood the siege. It was the line from
which, after all those months of war, the tide turned and the besieged
became the attackers.
* * * * *
To most of the British soldiers who took part in the Battle of the
Somme, the town of Albert must be a central point in a reckoning of
distances. It lies, roughly speaking, behind the middle of the line of that
battle. It is a knot of roads, so that supports and supplies could and did

move from it to all parts of the line during the battle. It is on the main
road, and on the direct railway line from Amiens. It is by much the
most important town within an easy march of the battlefield. It will be,
quite certainly, the centre from which, in time to come, travellers will
start to see the battlefield where such deeds were done by men of our
race.
It is not now (after three years of war and many bombardments) an
attractive town; probably it never was. It is a small straggling town
built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at a point where the swift
chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so
channeled that it can be used for power. Before the war it contained a
few small factories, including one for the making of sewing-machines.
Its most important building was a big church built a few years ago,
through the energy of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert, a
small, probably not very old image, about which strange stories are told.
Before the war it was thought that this church would become a northern
rival to Lourdes for the working of miraculous cures during the
September pilgrimage. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child stood on
an iron stalk on the summit of the church tower. During a
bombardment of the town at a little after three o'clock in the afternoon
of Friday, January 15, 1915, a shell so bent the stalk that the statue bent
down over the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of our soldiers will
remember Albert for anything except this diving Virgin. Perhaps half
of the men engaged in the Battle of the Somme passed underneath her
as they marched up to the line, and, glancing up, hoped that she might
not come down till they were past. From some one, French or English,
a word has gone about that when she does fall the war will end. Others
have said that French engineers have so fixed her with wire ropes that
she cannot fall.
* * * * *
From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield of the Somme:
1. In a north-westerly direction to Auchonvillers and Hébuterne.
2. In a northerly direction to Authuille and Hamel.

3. In a north-easterly direction to Pozières.
4. In an easterly direction to Fricourt and Maricourt.
Between the second and the third of these the little river Ancre runs
down its broad, flat, well-wooded valley, much of which is a marsh
through which the river (and man) have forced more than one channel.
This