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THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1917. 792

THINGS SEEN: FROM FLANDERS TO ALSACE.

From that lonely, fatal valley between Bazentin, Martinpuich, and what once High Wood, we drove through the fragments of Combles and the strewings of other places to the husk of Péronne. It was an ancient and comfortable little city with more private motor-cars per head of the population than any other provincial town in France. But the Bothe before his retreat plundered, burned, and wrecked. The noble midæval church has reeled and collapsed upon its own lower arches; within its roofless walls and aisles half-standing you climb heaps of tumbled stones. The thread-bare fabric of the upper part of the Hotel de Ville topples crumily [?] over its colonnade. Catherine de Poix's pedestal—she was the local Jeanne d'Arc—has lost its statue. The houses even of the streets that seem to remain fairly intact are methodically gutted row on row. Let us apologise to Attila and his original Huns, and remember what this war means. No tourist will ever see the Péronne that was. We returned by other villages that merely have been; and yet the sky had cleared, and in the full light of a summer afternoon the reaches of the Somme shone blue.