The western front;

THE
RN FRONT

Drawings by

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LIBRARY.
Brigham-Young University
RARE BOOK COLLECTION

PRICE SIXTY CENTS

THE
TERN FRONT

DRAWINGS BY

i MUIRHEAD BONE

PART L.

Volume 2

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS OF
ARRAS, BAPAUME, PERONNE, THIEPVAL,
THE VIMY RIDGE, THE LOOS SALIENT,
DISTANT LENS, FOUCAUCOURT, LIHONS,

AND OTHER POINTS OF INTEREST IN THE GREAT ADVANCE

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1917.

PRICE SIXTY CENTS VOL. 2. PART I.

THE
WESTERN FRON

DRAWINGS BY

MUIRHEAD BONE

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1917.

THE CASTLE OF PERONNE

(Cover Illustration).

For a description of another view of this Castle, see Plate IV

THE CATHEDRAL, ARRAS
(Headpiece)

Seen from the North-west. The cross is at the summit
of the West front. ‘The German front line, until April 9,
1917, ran from left to right, a mile away, across the
suburbs of the city. It was there that the German and

British sentries stood, at one point, within twenty feet of —

each other, as described in the Introduction to Part III of
“The Western Front.” The Cathedral, now roofless
and ruined past repair, was a late eighteenth century
building, not of the first order. The ruined tower of the
more beautiful Town Hall, a building full of rich and
curious Gothic and Renaissance work in stone and wood,
is seen on the left.

THE BATTLE OF ARRAS

OR a few miles the cornlands of Artois are fenced off by a thin
wall of hill from the coalfield of Flanders. The wall juts out
East from Bouvigny, high with a level top, like a railway embank-
ment, and then suddenly breaks, eaten through by the little river
of Souchez. From the East end of this hill Mr. Bone made four of
these drawings. From it almost the whole battlefield of Arras can be
seen. In front, on the left, stand the ruins of Angres and Liévin;
beyond them, the ruins of Lens. A little more to the right, with a
curve of the Souchez valley between, is the little whale-backed Vimy Ridge
—a blasted heath coloured in all the dull tones of faded fawn velvet and
seamed and cross-seamed with many trenches. More to the right are
the ravaged woods of 'Thélus and Neuville St. Vaast. Still more to the
right are two broken stalks of masonry on a hill. With other shattered
stonework uniting their bases, they form a rough capital U. ‘They are
the ruins of the monastery church of Mont St. Eloi. Beyond them, on
a clear day, may be seen, gleaming white, the broken stones of the tower
and nave of Arras Cathedral.
Turning again towards the left, you see, north of Lens, a wide flat,

with no visible end and no special features except the many pyramids of
shale at pit-heads and the many pit villages with their strictly parallel

rows of red roofs. On this level floor is the salient of Loos. Loos
itself, Bully Grenay, the Double Crassier, Hulluch and Haisnes, are all
within sight. So is Hill 70, outside the salient and looking down on it.
Looking once more to your front, due Eastward over the shoulder of the
Vimy Ridge, you see a blue expanse of plain, with the towers of Douai
far out in it; still further away, on the right of this plain, there rise
gentle slopes, the last outward ripples of the disturbance which, at its
centre, raised the Ardennes. The blue expanse is the main plain of the
Low Countries, the shallow plate-like basin of the lazy Scheldt, where
half of Western Europe’s modern battles were fought—Jemappes and
Oudenarde and Ramillies, Ligny, Quatre Bras and Waterloo.

An hour before dawn on April gth the old front line could be traced.

from this hill. It was marked out, from furlong to furlong, by the
occasional rise and burst of a little ball of fire sent up by some British or
German sergeant to light up the section of enemy parapet watched by
his own platoon. The morning was dark, the moon just setting behind
heavy clouds, and the straggling frontier of flares showed up pretty well
for more than twelve miles. It passed through a suburb of Arras
and came on between the two black serrations made on the sky-line by
the remains of the woods of Thélus and Neuville St. Vaast, mounted
obliquely the western slant of Vimy Ridge and then dropped down and
crossed the Souchez River, rounded the outskirts of Angres and Liévin
and went away to the far North-East in the sickle-like curve of the
bulging British advance beyond Loos in the autumn of 1915.

There were at that moment only the usual nightly sights and sounds
of the Western Front. Up and down it a few guns were grumbling.
From somewhere below there would come a short run of the woodpecker
taps of a Lewis gun ; nothing more than these routine notes of alertness
—so long an affair of routine that on men’s ears out here they come at
last to have an effect of indolence, or at least of repose. With nothing
more doing than that, you seem to feel the war taking its rest, as in quiet
places in England you seem to hear the earth breathing in its sleep
when the only sound at night is the bark of a distant fox, or an owl
calling.

Ten minutes later the battle began. No storm ever broke with
such suddenness. At one second there was that calm; at the next our
whole front was one shimmering line of little splashes of fire, all close
together. ‘They might have been all turned on from one switch. But
from that moment each had a switch of its own, and flashed on and off
as if some quick wrist were turning and re-turning it for a wager. The
whole line danced like a shaken string of diamonds with the constant
ignition and extinction and reignition of each of its constituent jets of
flame. It lasted like that for some seconds and then another line of fires,

wider apart from one another, broke out along the German front trench
—thick geysers of turbid light leaping up forty or fifty feet, with black
objects in it, like “‘ golden rain”’ fireworks magnified. A few seconds
more and a third line of fires, signal rockets from the endangered enemy
line, rushed up high above these others and filled a stratum of upper air
with drifting stars, white, red and green, as though a twelve-mile line of
sinking ships were crying out at the same instant for, help.,

There was no sound at first. It made its way up the hill slowly,
broken and blurred by a rough western gale that had risen towards dawn
and now tore one of our captive balloons from its moorings and whirled
it up into the clouds, out of sight in a moment. When the sound
came it seemed old and of little account; each move in the rushing
drama below had already been told in that more articulate language of
legible fire. The darkness hid nothing ; it merely served as the page, the
darker the better, on which the flashing letters were written. When
morning broke we knew where to look; it seemed as if we had, all this
time, been watching our men. ‘There they were, in a flexible line,
ascending the opposite hill, between the second and third German
systems of trenches, with that strange air of leisure which makes a
modern infantry charge foreign to all old notions of war; the guardian
cloud of smoke marching before them ; the men, miniatured by distance,
ambling steadily on with arms at the trail, each moving speck in visibly
sensitive touch with the specks on its right and left, so that a gap was no
sooner made by an enemy shell than the lips of the wound drew together
and the line was whole again and still moved steadily on. ‘Then the
rifles would come to the guard and the even line would leap suddenly
forward into the thinning smoke that hung over the next German trench.

It was a blank dawn, without colour or warmth; wild squalls of
sleet whipped the back of one’s neck; frightened rooks were blowing
about the sky; close overhead our aeroplanes were riding up and down
on the gale, tossing like boats on a rough sea while they waited for light
to get out to their work. In all the wild landscape of desert and
ruins, pelted and lashed with tempest and rain, the only glow was in the
eager minds of our men. A whistled tune came up the hill from some
- reserve battalion moving up on the shadowy road below :—

“OQ! Ho! Ho! I am surprised at you.”

One recognised them, equable and keen and gay, beguiling the
length of the way into battle as they had beguiled the last miles of a score
of route marches over the Wiltshire downs.

G. H. Q., FRANCE,
May, 1917

AT BAPAUME

Even in the haste of their departure the enemy found time
to make an absolute ruin of the pleasant little country town
of Bapaume, which had already suffered much injury
from our shell fire. Not one house is habitable. The
Germans seem to have taken special pains to demolish or
deface little household goods of no military importance,
such as mirrors, carved furniture and small ornaments.
These works of charity were completed even in places
where the time necessary for strictly military demolition
work, such as the felling of telegraph posts, appears to
have run short. When the artist was drawing this
abomination of desolation, he asked a British soldier what
he thought of it all. ‘‘ Well, sir,” he answered, with the
cautious moderation of the North-countryman, ‘it seems
to me that the Germans have made a mess of this place.”

Il

THIEPVAL

The drawing shows some of the most hard-fought acres of
the whole Somme battlefield. ‘The hole in the foreground
admits to part of the vast cellarage of what was Thiepval
Chateau. In the left distance is the village of Mesnil, on
a partly wooded hill, with the Ancre visible below it.
British communication trenches, in rear of Beaucourt and
Beaumont Hamel, are seen on the right.

III

THE ROAD TO PERONNE

A point on the long straight road across the Santerre from
near Amiens to Péronne. Before the German retreat of
this year the front line crossed the road about four miles
away, in the direction in which the spectator is looking.

IV

THE CASTLE OF PERONNE

The drawing was made from the rampart of the sixteenth
century castle known to British readers through Scott’s
description, in ‘‘ Quentin Durward,” of a few of the
incidents of its tempestuous history. The castle is a
wonderful example of the small fortified palace of its time.
Round its main courtyard are residences—some of later
date—for the higher ranks of the garrison, and a steep
circular road, winding round the inside of the rampart,
leads up to a miniature street of soldiers’ quarters on its
summit. The castle, though battered by shell-fire, is not
past restoration. In the background are the more hopeless
ruins of the Church of St. Jean.

Vv

A RUINED VILLA NEAR PERONNE

The shattered villa was old and well built, and its strongly-
knit brickwork bent in places, like a sheet of metal, without
breaking. In the foreground is seen a shell-hole.

VI

THE TOWN HALL OF PERONNE

The South wing, the oldest part, of the fine Renaissance
Town Hall of Péronne. Among the reliefs decorating the
facade may be seen the salamander badge of Francis I.
The broken town clock is seen lying among the ruins of a
clock tower that rose from the left corner of the roof.
Before the Germans looted it, the building housed a fine
collection of Gallic coins, Roman bronzes, Frankish
antiquities, and early printed books. Nothing is left but a
few tumbled books.

Vil

RUINS OF THE CHURCH AT PERONNE

The ruins of St. Jean, the chief church of Péronne, an
early sixteenth century building with a beautiful western
facade. The interior was rich in fine metal work and
good stained and painted glass. It may have suffered
some damage from Allied shells, but its final demolition by
the Germans was clearly deliberate, for the ruined walls
have been blown outwards. Behind the altar there was a
sculptured relief, with many small figures, and the head of
every one has been broken off with a precision that cannot
be mistaken for the random havoc of shell-fire.

VIII

WRECKED RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE
SOMME AT PERONNE

A specimen of legitimate demolition by a defeated and
retreating army. ‘There is a moral world of difference
between attempts of this kind to delay a pursuing enemy
and the base spite which systematically destroys little
household ornaments and cottage gardens.

IX (a and b)

A RUINED VILLAGE IN FRANCE

A village less completely destroyed than its neighbours.
It is possible that some of its houses may be repaired.
The church had a rose window in its West front and was
of rather more ambitious design than is usual in a little
Picardy village. It is destroyed beyond . restoration,
nothing remaining except a fragment of the West tower.
Our advances of last year and this have now placed the
village out of range of the German guns.

A REST -BYee DE Evan.

A remarkable diversity of attitude can be achieved on a hot
day by a company of infantry in which every man is

trying to get the maximum of repose out of the hourly
halt of ten minutes.

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{PEO Sp re ee
2 SEE ORO &

Xx

DISTANT VIEW OF THE VIMY RIDGE

The ridge is seen, on the sky-line, from near Louez, about
five miles away south-westwards. On the left end of the
ridge is La Folie Wood, which has since been almost
completely destroyed by shells. Below the wood are the
trenches that the Germans held when the Battle of Arras
began. :

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XI

THE FIGHT FOR LENS, FROM NOTRE
DAME DE LORETTE

During the British attack on Lens the enemy have been
burning the town by degrees. In the drawing the smoke
of some of these fires may be seen amidst the bursts of
British and German shells round the town. In the
foreground are a few of the shell-holes left on the ridge of
Notre Dame de Lorette by the battle which the French
fought for it in May, 1915. Lens, dimly seen through the
smoke, is a straggling modern mining town with a small
ancient town, formerly fortified, at its core. ‘This ancient
town endured attack and capture many times from the
fifteenth to the eighteenth century. In the obscurity
beyond it is the plain of Douai.

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XII

DISTANT LENS, FROM NOTRE DAME
DE LORETTE

The East end of the ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, a
view-point described in the Introduction. The ridge
is five miles long, with steep sides and a level top. In the
autumn of 1914 it was all in the enemy’s hands. In the
following winter the French gained a footing on it, and in
May, 1915, they won the whole ridge by thirteen days’
fighting of extreme severity. In the foreground are seen
the remains of old French trenches and dug-outs, and
many shell-holes ; in some places the ground is still littered
with the wreckage of the battle of two years ago.

XI

THE LOOS SALIENT AND BURNING
LENS

The high ground on the right of the drawing is the North
side of the ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette. On its left,
in the distance, is seen the smoke of incendiary fires lit by
the Germans in Lens, where great explosions were to be
heard from the time when our attack on its outskirts began.
More to the left, on the plain below, may be picked out
the villages of Aix-Noelette, Grenay, Bully Grenay, and
the more distant Loos.

XIV

A ROAD TO THE FRONT
A CAMP AT A BASE

The snug camp, with its sylvan background and its general
air of order and security, is in fine contrast with the road
to the front and its surroundings, where everything is
either a fragment or a makeshift. Trench war has its
glories, but they are not those of a pageant, and nothing
could well be more free from ‘‘ pomp and circumstance ”’
than a battlefield of to-day, with a warren of squalid
burrows in place of the ‘‘ tented field,” and tangled skeins of
telephone wire instead of gallopers, and with everything
that might be effective in colour or striking in form avoided
by both armies as if it were poison.

XV

FOUCAUCOURT

The parish church of a village on the dead-straight ancient
road across the Santerre plateau from Amiens eastward to
the Somme at Brie and on to Vermand. On the floor
of the ruined church is seen the entrance to a French
dug-out. Foucaucourt was a mile and a half behind the
French front when the Battle of the Somme began.

XVI
THE PIT OF MOUQUET FARM

All that is left of the famous solitary farm, on the ridge
between Thiepval and Martinpuich, which was fought for
as desperately in 1916 as Pozitres Windmill, a mile or so
on its east. The earth under and round the farm had been
turned by the enemy into a maze of tunnels which enabled
snipers and machine guns to emerge, apparently from the
bare earth, and to vanish into it again, at unexpected
places. The “pit” is the ruin of a great cistern. With
its roof there has collapsed a dug-out which had been made _
over it. Aveluy Wood is seen in the distance.

XVII

THE GRAND MANOIR DE LIHONS
Lihons, already shattered by last year’s fighting, was just
behind the French front as it stood at the beginning of this
year. ‘The Grand Manoir was a building of some conse-
quence, and of good design, standing beside the road. In
the foreground on the right is a small fort, with wide slits
for traversing machine guns. ‘They commanded the main
cross roads of the village. On the left there remains a
tangle of barbed wire.

XVIII

THE CHURCH OF LIHONS
oe
An example of the desolation which the war has made of
the Eastern half of the Santerre, the rich grain-growing
plateau which lies south of the Somme between Corbie
and Péronne.

UPS

XIX

THE PRIEST’S GARDEN: SPRING

About a mile behind the French front line as it ran before
the Battle of the Somme. ‘The village is now out of range
of the German guns, and this spring the shell-blasted tree
in the foreground has begun to put out new twigs, and
crocuses and tulips are coming up among the unexploded
‘“‘dud”’ shells lying in the parish priest’s garden. In the
foreground an old French trench can be seen.

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XX

A SOLDIERS’ CEMETERY

An improvised cemetery behind a part of the front which
was held by the French during the Battle of the Somme
and is now held by British troops. ‘The graves are marked
by rough crosses or by the rifle or steel helmet of the dead
man. Shell-fire has disturbed many of the graves. On
the right of the ruined house is seen the entrance to a
dug-out.

WAR DRAWINGS

MUIRHEAD BONE

EDITION DE LUXE. Size 20 by 15 inches. Printed in two or more colours.
TEN PLATES IN EACH PART.

Contents of the First Part:

1. F.M. Str Dovucuas Haire, G.C.B. 6. A Gun HospiranL
2. Distant VIEW OF YPRES Vanes AINIKS)-°
3. GRAND’PLACE AND RUINS OF THE 8. WATCHING OUR ARTILLERY FIRE
CiotH Hau, YPRES ON TRONES Woopd'- FROM
4. THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME MONTAUBAN
5. Gorpon HiIGHLANDERS, OFFICERS’ 9. AMIENS CATHEDRAL
Mess 10. Tue Nicut Picker

Any of these subjects will be obtainable separately.

“TANKS”

A special large size facsimile reproduction, 28 by 20% inches, of Mr. Muirhead
Bone’s superb drawing of the ‘“‘ Tanks”? will be obtainable.

MUNITION DRAWINGS

Size 313 by 22 inches. Six in Portfolio.

Tre Nicutr SHIFT WORKING ON A MounrtTING A GREAT GUN
Great GUN Movine Heavy Gun TuBES

THE GIANT SLOTTERS A Corinc MAcHINE AT WORK ON A BiG
Nicut WorkK ON THE BREECH OF A Gun TUBE
GREAT GUN

WITH THE GRAND FLEET

Size 314 by 22 inches. Six in Portfolio.

H.M.S. Lion 1n Dry Dock A BATTLESHIP AT NIGHT

On Boarp a BatrLe-Cruiser (H.M.S. | “Orinc”?: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN
Lion) Oi Fue. at SEA

INSIDE THE TURRET Tue BorLeR Room or A BATTLESHIP

Any of these subjects will be obtainable separately.

Further particulars of these publications will be sent on application to the Publishers,
CARDEN CITY, NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.

The Western Front

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

I—AT BAPAUME XI._THE FIGHT FOR LENS, FROM
Il.—THIEPVAL NOTRE DAME DE LORETTE
I.—THE ROAD TO PERONNE XII—DISTANT LENS, FROM NOTRE
IV._THE CASTLE OF PERONNE DAME DE LORETTE
V.—A RUINED VILLA NEAR PERONNE XIIJ._THE LOOS SALIENT, AND BURN-
VI._THE TOWN HALL OF PERONNE ING LENS
VIL—RUINS OF THE CHURCH AT XIV.—(a) A ROAD TO THE FRONT
PERONNE XIV.—(b) A CAMP AT A BASE
VIII._WRECKED RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER XV.—FOUCAUCOURT
THE SOMME AT PERONNE XVI.—THE PIT OF MOUQUET FARM
IX.—(a) A RUINED VILLAGE IN FRANCE | XVII—THE GRAND MANOIR DE LIHONS
IX._(b) A REST BY THE WAY XVIII.—THE CHURCH OF LIHONS
X.—DISTANT VIEW OF THE VIMY XIX._THE PRIEST’S GARDEN: SPRING
RIDGE XX.—A SOLDIERS’ CEMETERY

IN PREPARATION.

THE WESTERN FRONT—Vol. L

WITH INTRODUCTION BY
FreLD-MarsHaL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG,

G.C/B'GiC.V.04 -KiClLE eC,

The first five parts of ‘“‘The Western Front” will be bound up in volume form,
with additional letterpress and index. This publication will contain 100 plates
after Mr. Muirhead Bone’s drawings with the British Armies in the Field, in
Munition Works in England, and with the Grand Fleet.

Contents

THE WESTERN FRONT
THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD
TRENCH SCENERY
THE UPPER HAND
THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT

Further particulars of this publication will be sent on application to the Publishers,
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.

Printed in Great Britain by Hupson & Kearns, Lrp., Hatfield Street, London, S.E.

The Western Front

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

I—AT BAPAUME XI—THE FIGHT FOR LENS, FROM
IIl.—THIEPVAL NOTRE DAME DE LORETTE
I1.—_THE ROAD TO PERONNE XII—DISTANT LENS, FROM NOTRE
IV.—_THE CASTLE OF PERONNE DAME DE LORETTE
V.—A RUINED VILLA NEAR PERONNE XIIJ.—_THE LOOS SALIENT, AND BURN-
VI._THE TOWN HALL OF PERONNE ING LENS
VII.—RUINS OF THE CHURCH AT | XIV.—(a) A ROAD TO THE FRONT
PERONNE XIV.—(b) A CAMP AT A BASE
VIII. WRECKED RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER XV.—FOUCAUCOURT
THE SOMME AT PERONNE XVI.—_THE PIT OF MOUQUET FARM
IX.—(a) A RUINED VILLAGE IN FRANCE XVII—THE GRAND MANOIR DE LIHONS
IxX.—(b) A REST BY THE WAY XVIII.—THE CHURCH OF LIHONS
X—DISTANT VIEW OF THE VIMY XIX.—THE PRIEST’S GARDEN: SPRING
RIDGE XX.—A SOLDIERS’ CEMETERY

IN PREPARATION.

THE WESTERN FRONT— Vol. I.

WITH INTRODUCTION BY
Firtp-MarsHaL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG,

G.C.B., -G.C.V.04)-K.ChEn a oe.

The first tive parts of ‘“‘The Western Front’’ will be bound up in volume form,
with additional letterpress and index. This publication will contain 100 plates.
after Mr. Muirhead Bone’s drawings with the British Armies in the Field, in
Munition Works in England, and with the Grand Fleet.

Contents

THE WESTERN FRONT
THE SOMME BATTLEFIELD
TRENCH SCENERY
THE UPPERS HAND
THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT

Further particulars of this publication will be sent on application to the Publishers,
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.

Printed in Great Britain by Hupson & Kearns, Lrp., Hatfield Street, London, S.E.

PRICE SIXTY CENTS VOL. 2. PART II.

ESTERN FRONT

M7 | _ DRAWINGS BY

~~ MUIRHEAD BONE

+

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1917.

DESERTS

N France the war has made several kinds of desert, each with a
quality of its own, derived from the way in which it was made.
Verdun I have not seen. Of the other deserts the first in date was
that of the Somme battlefield. In earlier parts of the ‘‘ Western

Front” it has been drawn, in sample, several times. It spreads so far
that, in bulk, it can only be seen from the air. It is the most evenly
finished of all these made deserts. From the Ancre to the Santerre you
pass through different kinds of landscape. ‘There are little hills, river
meadows, and a high grain-bearing flat. Over them all there was laid in
1916 a kind of spotted brown counterpane or mask which makes them
all look alike. The spots on this cloth are dense along its middle and
grow less dense towards its fringe all round. To an eye that knew the
country well before the war, it must seem now as if the villages, with all
their differences of look, and the various greens or yellows of the old
crops, must surely be hidden under this spotted coverlet. But really
they are not there, and the brown is that of bare and raw earth, and the
spots are shell-holes.

The next kind of desert was made by the enemy, partly at leisure
and partly in haste, when he fell back between the battles of the Somme
and of Arras. Here there is nothing that seems to express the
indiscriminate fury traditionally ascribed to war. ‘The Somme battle-
field really does look as if some irresistible angel of death and demolition
had breathed in the face of the whole country and its occupants. Nothing
has been let off, neither village nor field, nor wood, nor even the graves
of the dead. It might have looked like this on the site of the cities of the
plain, after the catastrophe. In the country from which the Germans
did not wait to be driven the havoc is less exhaustive, more selective,
more obviously purposeful in detail; each unit of destructive force
employed has gone, on the average, much further, a little gun-cotton or
dynamite doing the important part of the work of a thousand shells. In
the fields there are few shell-holes; many fields, when we took them,
were ploughed and harrowed and ready for sowing. ‘The roadside trees
are not roughly broken across and shredded by shells aimed at something
else, but are cut clean through with the saw, two feet from the ground.
The houses are not battered in from without by many fortuitous hits,
but are methodically blown outwards from within by sufficient charges
of some high explosive placed against the inside of the walls. In a house
wrecked by shell-fire the roof is usually one of the first parts to go ; in a
house demolished in the German manner the walls are knocked out from
under the roof and lie on the ground outside, as heaps of brick and lime,
and the roof settles down, often almost intact and erect, on the ground
inside these ruins, with a grotesque likeness to a hat placed on the
ground.

At first sight all this wrecking looks cold-blooded. ‘The German
Staff defends it as being cold-blooded. It was, the Staff say, the cold-
blooded execution of the legitimate tactical manceuvre of giving to a
pursuing enemy a desert to live in and to attack from. But, when you
look into the German demolitions between the Scarpe and the Aisne,
you feel that many things here were done not in cold blood but in
something worse. When you find houses, of some use as billets, left
standing, but all the heads chipped off the little figures of angels and saints
in the reredos of an ancient church, you cannot quite feel that military
necessity accounts for it all.

As you go eastward across the wilderness, six miles south of Arras,
you pass at first along roads beside which every tree and telegraph post
have been carefully felled, through villages in which no house or tree has
been spared which could shelter a man from the weather at night or from
aeroplane observation by day. At each cross-road a mine has been
blown so as to hamper pursuit. Along the first part of your way it is all
done deliberately and completely. But when you have passed through

the ruins of Boisieux-au-Mont and Boisieux-St.-Marce you begin to see
signs of hurry. Some of the trees here have escaped felling. Many
houses here have only been maimed, not destroyed. Cross-roads occur
at which you do not have to traverse the bed of a crater or coast round
its lip. You see that here the pursuit had grown hot; there was not
time to do all that military expediency required. But for one thing, not
so required, time did not fail; it was always found. Cottage gardens,
with their little orchards of espalier and small standard fruit trees, their
toy-like summer-houses and old box edging and slowly grown wistaria,
were always laid waste with a careful, circumstantial malignity which
seems still to grin out at you venomously from the wreckage of these
inoffensive little pleasaunces.

The craving to give gratuitous pain to unknown individual enemies
is a form of baseness not often found among soldiers fighting in the front
line, in this or any other war between white men. It is a disease, in the
main, of non-combatants. But German commanders cannot be acquitted
of having given way to this impulse of unknightly ill-nature, in the
chagrin of last winter’s retreat. Where they had not the time both
to impede the pursuing British army and also to cut down the
village priest’s half-grown cherry trees, or to prevent some old French
cottager from ever sitting in her little yew-tree arbour again, then these
practitioners of scientific war really seem to have thrown Clausewitz to
the winds and concentrated their forces against priest and old woman.
Hot blood and foul blood, not cold.

A third kind of desert was made on part of the new battlefield of
Arras. It resembles the first described here in so far as it was mainly
made by shell-fire, bombs and mines. But it has atouch of resemblance
to the second in the rather more obvious purposefulness of each stroke of
destruction. ‘There is more emphasis and selection. On the cloth
thrown over the Arras battlefield the pattern of spots is not so even as
that on the Somme. Even at its centre the spots are dense at one point
and sparse at another. And you can nearly always see why they are
specially dense. ‘They cluster and crowd one another round the strong
points and lines of old German defences, while spaces less formidably
held, or not held at all, by the enemy were left almost unmarked by us
during the first days of rapid advance. ‘The difference is mainly due to
the quite simple reason that our artillery fire is more precise in 1917
than it was in 1916. It makes better—that is, smaller—groups of shell-
holes round the marks at which it aims.

G. H. Q., France.
June, 1917.

XXI

CHATEAU NEAR BRIE.

An ancient fortified and moated house at Happlincourt.
It had been to some extent injured by Allied shell-fire
when the Germans quitted it on their retreat. They blew
up parts of it with explosive charges. ‘The waters of the
moat are drawn from the Somme, which flows past the
house on its east.

XXII

THE GREAT CRATER, ATHIES
<

The largest of several craters made by the Germans in the
roads at or near Athies before their flight. The ruined
house belonged to the owner of a sugar refinery in the
place. ‘The house was without architectural interest, but
had a finely planted garden.

XXIII

THE GHURCH: OF ATHIES

A typical scene in the area laid waste by the retreating
Germans. All the wreckage seen here was done by hand
or with demolition charges of high explosive. ‘The land
in the foreground was the parish priest’s garden. All the
trees were fruit trees and they have all been sawn through
or felled with the axe. The sap was rising strongly in
them at the time and they have put forth many blossoms,
for the last time, as they lie rootless on the ground. The
church was blown up from within, but some caprice in the
action of the explosives has spared a beautiful fourteenth
century porch.

XXIV
DENIECOURT CHATEAU, ESTREES

The site of the Chateau is marked by the large heap of
ruins near the centre of the drawing. It was used for
head-quarters by Germans, French and British in
succession. In the space on the left of the Chateau are
some German soldiers’ graves. Fastened to a tree on the
right is the notice “Do not loiter here,” which is often
seen in places exposed to shell fire.

XXV

THE ORANGERY, DENIECOURT CHATEAU

In Northern France, as in England, an orangery was one
of the pleasant things included in the plan of many of the
older country houses. Of the orangery at Déniécourt—
one of the villages recovered by the French from the
Germans last year—nothing remains but a few broken
pots and fragments of wood and ironwork.

XXVI

ECCE SIGNUM

A shell has struck a large crucifix standing in a rural
cemetery which, like many others, contains a small
proportion of older civilian graves and a large proportion
of new graves of soldiers.

XXVII (a and b)

———

A SUGAR FACTORY IN THE SANTERRE

Sugar beet is the chief farm product of the part of France
which includes the Somme and Arras battlefields, the
damp Channel climate being better for roots than for fruit
or grain, while the nearness of the Pas de Calais coal field
cheapens the extraction of sugar and alcohol from the
beet. The waste products of these processes feed a
number of cattle out of proportion to the pasture land of
the district, and the presence of so many cattle secures the
manuring of the beet fields. Thanks to this system of
interdependencies, sugar refineries abounded on all the
northern battlefields of the Western front. Great
piles of broken and twisted machinery, lying between
ruined walls, show the energy with which many of these
factories, which usually stand a little apart from villages,
have been attacked and defended.

AN, OED? ORL.

In a tree on the left is seen the remaining woodwork of an
old “O. P.,” ““O Pip,” or Observation Post for artillery,
with the means of access to it. In the centre, receding
from the spectator, is a line of narrow gauge railway
running up to the trenches. The Allied advance of this
year has rendered this “‘O. P.”’ obsolete, so that it can safely
be shown in a published drawing.

XXVIII

VILLERS CARBONNEL

Villers Carbonnel was a village near the western verge of
the territory evacuated by the Germans early in 1917. It
had suffered some injury from shell-fire in 1916, and was
utterly wrecked by the Germans before they left it.

XXX \

A ROSE GARDEN

A rare specimen of the not quite complete destruction by
the Germans of every amenity in the country which they
had to leave in the winter of 1916-17. The arches on
which the roses had been trained are still standing, though
knocked about, and the lines of the box edging can be
traced, though the beauty of the old formal garden is
spoilt past restoration. ‘The Germans wrecked the church
behind the garden by means of charges of explosives
placed inside its walls.

XXX

A GERMANS EO:

The remains of the Chateau of Damery, a fine old house
a little way behind the German front line after the battle
of the Somme. The enemy used its basement as a head-
quarters; the entrance may be seen at the ground level.
‘The damage seen was caused by shell-fire. The German
devastations began a little further behind their front.

XXXI
THE CHATEAU, FOUCAUCOURT

This country house stood about a mile and a half behind
the Allied front line before the battle of the Somme. It
was shattered by German shells. The trees, also mutilated
by shell-fire, have made valiant efforts to revive in the
spring of 1917. Affixed toa tree on the left there remains
a billeting officer’s notice of the amount of accommodation
available for troops in the cellars of the house.

XXXII

A RUINED TRENCH : MONT SI. EVO!
IN THE DISTANCE

Mont St. Eloi was one of the finest view-points along the
old front. There was an ancient abbey on the top of
the hill, and the two irregular stems of masonry seen in
the drawing are the remains of two tall towers added to it
in the eighteenth century. Below the hill, and on the left
of the ruin, the French carried the little village of La
Targette, in 1915, in one of the most gallant and bloodiest
assaults of the war. The German front line has now
ebbed far away from the hill, but the position of the front
is nearly always indicated roughly by an irregular line of
shell bursts.

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XXXITI

HERBECOURT CHURCH

In the country recovered by the French from the Germans,
south of the Somme, in 1916. ‘The damage done here,
as at the neighbouring Assevillers, was by shell-fire. A
comparison of this drawing with that of “The Church
of Assevillers’’ shows how capriciously destruction goes
about its work. At Herbécourt a single pillar remains, as
a kind of fortuitous monument of the rest of the church.

XXXIV

THE CHURCH OF ASSEVILLERS

Assevillers is a village south-west of Péronne. The
French won it back from the Germans in the summer of’
1916, and it was close to the line taken over by British
troops from the French in the following winter. The
church had then been destroyed by shell-fire. Near
Assevillers there was to be seen for some months at the
beginning of 1917 the most remarkable of many ravaged
village cemeteries ; monuments, coffins and bones were all
displaced, broken and mixed together by the explosions of
shells among the graves.”

XXXV

“OUT OF THis rine

When a Scottish Division comes out of the trenches to
rest, one of its special joys is that of listening at ease to
the regimental pipers. A group of typical warrant officers
and senior non-commissioned officers of the Black Watch
are here seen in full fruition of this delight. To appreciate
rightly the music of the pipes an Englishman should hear
it played to a Scots Battalion marching up to the front or
to the thinned platoons marching westwards when relieved
after a hard fight.

XXXVI

NEAR DOMPIERRE

The building which is here seen ruined by shell-fire had
apparently been the farm-house of some well-to-do man
with agriculture for his hobby. The broken gates were
good ironwork, with the initials of the owner worked into
their design, and the whole place must have worn a look
of comfort and some handsomeness.

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XXXVII

““ INCONNU ”

The grave of some officer or man whose body could not
be identified is a common sight in this war, in which an
unusually large percentage of casualties are caused by shell-
fire and bombs, and some of the dead remain for a long
time out of reach in No Man’s Land. Some of the unknown
are buried by their comrades, and some by their enemies,
the graves bearing such inscriptions, in English, French, or
German, as ‘‘’I‘wo unknown Germans buried here,”
“Unknown. He died for his country,” or “‘ Here rests an
English soldier.” |The grave seen here was at the edge
of a little wood near Estrées.

XXXVIII

MAIN STREET OF FLERS: SUNSET

The scene of a famous episode on September 15th, 1916,
the day on which tanks first went into action. One tank,
impulsively driven, made its way, ahead of our general
advance, into the main street of Flers, followed by a
cheering crowd of British infantry, and moved up and
down the village, firing its machine guns, until the
resistance of the enemy garrison ceased.

XXXIX
ROUEN

Like Innsbruck and Winchester, Rouen has the charm of
an ancient capital with the surroundings of a country town.
Here Joan of Arc was burnt and King John murdered
Prince Arthur; the walls defied our Henry V in Agincourt
year. Sea-going vessels steam 70 miles up the Seine—
and it is one of the most beautiful river journeys in Europe
—to the quay shown in the foreground of the drawing.
Rouen has more precious heirlooms of medizval archi-
tecture than any other French city ; it is ‘‘ earthlier happy”
in the possession of a good damp climate for spinning
cotton, excellent shops, and a pleasant race-course, covered
at present by the tents and huts of a British military
hospital, administered from the grand stand.

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XL

ON A HOSPITAL SHIPCAIW NIGEL hes hn
ORDERLY

The drawing was made on one of the smaller and less
perfectly equipped hospital ships which have occasionally
had to be called into the service during times of hard
fighting. Like most night-sisters in hospitals, an R.A.M.C.
orderly on night duty usually ties himself, as it were, with
an elastic string, to a piece of literature, so that he can at
once be drawn away from it by the needs of any of his
patients, but springs back to his reading as soon as this pul!
is relaxed.

The Western Front

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

VOL. 2. PART AL

XXI.—CHATEAU NEAR BRIE
XXII.—THE GREAT CRATER, ATHIES
XXIII.—THE CHURCH OF ATHIES
XXIV.—DENIECOURT CHATEAU, ESTREES
XXV.—THE ORANGERY, DENIECOURT CHATEAU
XXVI.—ECCE SIGNUM
XXVII.—(a) A SUGAR FACTORY IN THE SANTERRE
XXVIL=@) “AN; OLD:“O-2
XXVIIIL—VILLERS CARBONNEL
XXIX.—A ROSE GARDEN
XXX.—A GERMAN H.Q.
XXXI—THE CHATEAU, FOUCAUCOURT

XXXII.—A RUINED TRENCH:
MONT ST. ELOI IN THE DISTANCE

XXXIII._HERBECOURT CHURCH
XXXIV.—THE CHURCH OF ASSEVILLERS
XXXV.—“‘OUT OF THE LINE”
XXXVI.—NEAR DOMPIERRE
XXXVI.—“INCONNU”
XXXVITI.—MAIN STREET OF FLERS: SUNSET
XXXIX.-- ROUEN

XL.—ON A HOSPITAL SHIP AT NIGHT:
THE ORDERLY

PRICE SEXEY CENTS VOE72. “PART UIL

: THE
ESTERN FRONT

DRAWINGS BY

MUIRHEAD BONE

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1917.

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BEHIND THE FRONT

MAGINE a company of our infantry coming out of the trenches

to rest. From the zigzag crack in the earth, along which they

have walked for two miles, they come to the surface close to a

village. The village has holes in its eastern walls, but is not
destroyed. Just as the company enter the main village street some
German guns, groping about for some British guns which are not there,
begin to search the village with shells. Other shells are falling pretty
thickly on the road beyond the village. Along this road the troops
will have to pass to their billets, in cellars under the ruins of houses a
mile or two on. ‘The village street runs north and south, parallel to
the front. So the company commander orders his men to fall out and
rest, under the lee of the houses on the east side of the street, and let
the squall pass.

Everybody who comes from a trench is tired. ‘The men, glad of
any excuse for a halt, sit down on the cottage doorsteps and look at
civilian life, which seems amusing and curious after a long tour of duty
in trenches. Cottagers living on this the safe side of the street come to
their doors and talk to the troops unconcernedly. One woman, seeing

a boy of nineteen, with the looks of fifteen, badly tired, brings him some
hot coffee. He wants to pay, but she laughs and says “‘ Aprés la guerre.
Aprés la guerre.’ Children are coming from school, each with its gas-
mask slung at its side in a little satchel. Others are playing absorbedly
in the middle of the street, German shells having long lost the interest
of novelty, while the thrill of games is eternal. Nearly all the children
are well fed and clothed, as a French child is till its parents starve. One
child, very ragged, shuffles along past the men on the doorsteps, begging :
‘* Souvenir jam, souvenir boulie” (bully beef). ‘Two bolder spirits,
about ten years old, requisition ‘‘ Souvenir cigarette’ with jovial
assurance. Rebuked by a corporal who can speak French, one of the
imps surveys this moralist’s face with a finely assumed expression of
horror, and says ‘‘ Qu’il est laid!” to the other. ‘‘ Mon dieu, oui!” the
other replies. The corporal laughs and pays the desired tribute to the
unconquerable wit of the Gaul.

The shells are coming in faster ; one or two of them bump against
the backs of the houses in front of which the human comedy is going its
way. Little pieces of shrapnel fall and rattle on the roofs. Some of the
pieces slide down the slates and pitch over into the street. Women
come out to doors and order children to ‘‘ come in out of that,” as
British mothers do when it rains. On the western side of the street
shutters are being put up, to keep the small stuff away from the glass ;
householders, grumbling, descend into their cellars ; the last to go is a
woman with whom an English sergeant has bargained for thirty cups
of the very small beer of French Flanders, for his platoon. The contract
completed, she lingers to show him, with the just pride of a collector,
a large conical dent in her paved backyard—*‘ The fifth of June last year,
Sergeant—the largest shell that ever fell in this village.” ‘The enemy’s
fire is slackening now ; shutters begin to reopen ; the men swallow their
beer, fall in, and jog on ; already the children are playing again in the
street.

Most of the heads of households in places like this are widows with
children, or wives of Frenchmen now in the field. They fear leaving
home, or they do not know where else to go, and they can live by selling
a small range of wares to the English soldiers ; bread, which the men
like as a change from ration bread, though this is good ; chocolate, oranges,
apples, sardines, candles, of which you cannot have too many in dug-outs
and cellars ; picture post-cards, the most penetrative of all the merchan-
dise of the front. Other women wash for our men, or keep small
unofficial taverns with “‘ English beer and stout ”’ on a card in the window,

UPB

and tables arranged round the wall of a room, where the men sit in
warm semi-darkness at night and order their drinks in an Allied dialect,
half French, half English. ‘‘ Anchor a stoo, Miss; anchor a stoo,”’
someone will say who wants a glass more of stout.

To-morrow, perhaps, the company that has passed will be marching
off, much further westward, for its Divisional rest. As they pass remote
villages, women and children will issue from cottages, carrying little
trays of cakes and oranges slung from their necks, for sale to the men.
They will trail along beside the marching column, sometimes for miles,
awaiting the growth and renewal of appetite for their stock, with the
patient eagerness of sea-gulls that follow an outgoing ship. In the
evening the column may pass through a mining village near Béthune
or Bruay and see streaming away from the pithead a crowd of elderly
French miners, with whom our ex-miners in khaki, from Durham and
Yorkshire, contrive to exchange good technical chaff.

In France, as in England, the war has caused a great industrial
experiment to be made. An enormous number of people who used to
do some particular kind of work before the war are now doing something
else. Men who used to keep accounts or make chairs have charge of horses.
Women who used to make lace at Arras, or table-cloths at Cambrai, now
cut hair at Amiens or Rouen, or find new work of the factory kind in our
army’s big repair depots, where thousands of gas-masks and boots are
mended each day, and French girls test, with swift precision, the straight-
ness of British bayonets, on which much depends. They earn high
wages and sing all the time. Wool weavers from Lille and linen weavers
from Armentitres, middle-aged men, work at the hutting of troops at a
British base, directed by London contractors’ foremen: ‘‘ Tudsweet
(tout de suite), with them planks, sonnies, compry ?” a foreman will say
when he wants a job done. Of course there is plenty, too, of that less
sweeping redistribution of work which has always come with a war,
since Porsena marched on Rome. In Artois and Picardy old men
reap the harvests, and women drive ploughs, and boys wash sheep in the
Canche as they did in the Umbro.

G.H.Q., France.
July, 1917.

XLI

PANORAMA FROM THE SCHERPENBERG

The hill on the right is Kemmel. More distant, on the
left, is the Messines-Wytschaete ridge, the battlefield of
June 7th, 1917. ‘The battle is in progress. Most to the
left the ruins of Wytschaete village may be discerned
through the ravaged trees of Wytschaete Wood. Between
them and Kemmel may be made out the ruins of Messines.
The drawing was made from the windmill on the little
conical Scherpenberg knoll. The roof in the foreground
is that of an old farmhouse which has never been abandoned
by its tenant during nearly three years of exposure to
German shell-fire. At daybreak on June 7th the farmer’s
family were all watching the battle from their windows.
On Kemmel Hill, which is still more exposed, an old
woman and her two young grandchildren have remained
in their cottage throughout the war.

XLII

A STABLE ON THE WESTERN FRONT

A huge shed used temporarily as a stable. It made an
uncommonly good one, as things go in war-time.

XLII

THE VIMY RIDGE, FROM NOTRE
DAME DE LORETTE

The drawing shows clearly the general shape of the famous
little ridge—the western slope on which the French
gained a footing in June, 1915, and the crest over which

the Canadians—British and French—drove the enemy
eastwards at dawn on April oth, 1917.

XLIV

FIELD ARTILLERY SPORTS: THE
RIVAL GUN TEAMS ==

A visitor who saw the faultless smartness and cleanness
of the guns, the men, the horses and harness at these
sports could hardly believe that they had only come out
of action a few days before.

XLV

AN UNDERGROUND BILLET

Most billets anywhere near the front are underground.
This one is unusually serviceable. The ancient vaulted roof,
with any amount of protective ruins above it, can defy
the largest high-explosive shell; and the proportion of
external aperture to internal space is so small that a few
simple precautions can keep a great many men safe from
poison gas which, being heavier than air, tries to feel its
way down into cellars and dug-outs.

XLVI

SCOTTISH PIPERS

A Highland battalion was taking its turn of rest behind
the front at the time, and its pipers played every evening
at Retreat, to the delight of the French villagers, who
always turned out in their full available strength to listen
to the music of their Celtic kinsmen.

XLVII

A VIA DOLOROSA : MOUQUET FARM

The little white heap of ruins on the sky-line marks the
site of the famous farm. ‘The slope up which our men
fought their way to it is marked with improvised memorials
to a few of those who fell on the way. A similar series
of these tragic and noble finger-posts points the way up
from the valley of the Ancre to the heights of ‘Thiepval.
It is to be hoped that monuments so uniquely eloquent
as these Stations of the Cross of soldierly self-sacrifice
may not be suffered to disappear.

XLVIII

THE MEMORIAL ON THE FIELD
OF AGINCOURT

The artist found the village priest of Azincourt (as it is
now spelt) acting as guide to a party of British officers,
and showing them the positicns of the British and French
armies in the old battle. In approaching Agincourt,
Henry V. and his army traversed the Somme battle-field
of 1g16, and the English king lodged for a night at
Miraumont, on the Ancre, captured by the British from
the Germans this spring, in a state of ruin. Bardolph’s
theft of the pyxin Shakespeare’s ‘‘ Henry V.” was probably
suggested by a contemporary record of a similar incident
at or near Corbie, where the Ancre joins the Somme. ‘The
insistence of Shakespeare’s Henry V., in the Agincourt
campaign, on a policy of eschewing “ frightfulness,” even
when he had the German pretext of “‘ necessity ” for it,
has been a joy to many British soldiers engaged in the
present war against calculated savagery.

XLIX

ON THE SEINE, BETWEEN ROUEN
AND HAVRE

One of the tit-bits of good fortune that—at any rate till
recently—could befall a British soldier in France was to
be shipped direct from Rouen to England with a wound
not too severe to allow him to be on the deck of the hospital
ship as she steamed slowly down the Seine. As the coils
of the river unwind themselves before the cautiously
advancing ship, there are placed before your eyes, during
about seven hours, an almost bewildering series of beauti-
ful spectacles in which the landscape, the architecture,
the riverain life, and the character of the stream itself are
so completely different from those of any other great river
in Western Europe, that the most devout lover of the
Thames or the Rhone can delight in them without feeling
that his fidelity is being shaken.

BLOWN UP

The present state of the parish church of Athies, on the
east of the Somme, south of Péronne. It is in the area
evacuated by the Germans early in 1917, and was blown
up by them before they retreated.

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LI (a and b)

A RUINED ‘CHURCH IN] THEY ERS
SALIEN’P: DISTANT YE RES

On June 7th, 1917, Ypres ceased to be in a salient, one
horn of the crescent-shaped line of German positions
round it being planed away by the capture of the Messines-
Wytschaete ridge. These two drawings show the wide
flat, with the ruined city in its midst, on which the Germans
used to look down from their lines as the spectators look
down on a stage from the dress circle of a theatre.

LII

AN -OLDSBIELED

The very Scottish-looking house, with a great dovecote
in the upper part of its tower, has the date 1661 over the
door. Like many other ancient houses of some pretension
it is now a poor farm. ‘The farmer is away on service
in the French army, and all the work of the farm is done
by his wife and children. British soldiers out of the line
are billeted here from time to time.

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LIII

A SUPPLY RE-FILLING POINT

A roadside ‘“‘ dump ” to which the A.S.C. have brought
supplies from the railhead. Here the food for man and
beast remains under the charge of the A.S.C. until it is
removed by the transport waggons of the several units
of the division. ‘The waggons on the right are loading
with fodder for the divisional artillery horses.

LIV

DINNER TIME: MEN OF THE R-F-A;

The gunners of the New Army were surprisingly good
during the battle of the Somme, but in the battles of this
year their marksmanship has been far better. The infantry-
men of an army will always be exacting critics of its gunners
—it has sometimes been necessary to keep captured
German gunners and infantry apart from each other in
our lines—but after the battle of Messines our infantry
had nothing but praise for the artillery barrages behind
which they went into action.

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LV

THE BACK GARDEN

It oftens happens that a trench passes through the ruins
of a house, or is used to give safe access to some cellar
or ruined building which is of service as a habitation, a
machine-gun emplacement, or an observation post. Here
an unobtrusive chimney is seen issuing from a cellar
dug-out. The part of the house above ground was used
by the French, and afterwards by us, as an observation
post, but would not have offered safe quarters for troops.

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LVI

AN ARMY RENDEZVOUS IN FRANCE

The creeper-covered yard of a quaint inn in a small,
ancient French town. ‘There is no luxury at this inn, and
most of the waiting is done by one boy, but there is good
wine, the cook has ardour and ingenuity, and thousands
of officers fresh from the trenches have found the modest
comfort of the place divine. When you have been long
unused to them, a table-cloth, cutlery that shines, and a
bed with sheets strike you as if they were new and delicious
inventions.

LVII

SPITE

The garden of the house shown in the drawing of ‘* The
great Crater, Athies’ (XXII). The surrounding country
is well wooded and these woods offer excellent cover
for troops against aerial observation. They were not
felled by the Germans, but the ornamental trees in this
garden were all carefully destroyed, though their value
as cover for troops is trivial. The contrast forms a cutting
comment on the German Staff’s plea that the devastations
which it ordered were reluctant sacrifices by humane men
to military necessity or expediency.

LVIII

THE UNTILLED FIELDS

This, or something like it, meets the eye almost everywhere
behind the Western front. The ghost of a dead village
in the distance can be seen through, like the phantom
ship in the “‘ Ancient Mariner.” ‘The desolation, however,
does not last. The old agriculture creeps steadily forward
in the wake of the advancing Allied armies, and this summer
good fields of grain are waving on land that looked almost
hopelessly derelict last year. The work of reclamation
has received much help from British military authorities
‘agricultural departments ”
for the assistance of the returning farmers.

who have instituted regular

LIX

MEN OF THE R.F.A. CLEANING
THEIR GUNS

When a battery comes out of the line to rest, its first form
of repose is an orgy of gun-cleaning. The men of a good
battery could no more settle down to any less strenuous
recreation, while the guns were still dirty, than a Highland
sergeant could take his ease in his inn while there was
a patch not shining in the interior of his rifle barrel.

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spunk dehKO®

As a rule, the chateaux in the British zone cannot compare,
for beauty, with those of middle and southern France, but
here is one end of a beautiful house, lying among
great woods far behind the line and used, when the drawing
was made, as the head-quarters of some one or other of
our many units,

»

The Western Front

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
VOL PART II].

XLI.—PANORAMA FROM THE SCHERPENBERG
XLII.—A STABLE ON THE WESTERN FRONT

XLUI.—THE VIMY RIDGE, FROM NOTRE DAME DE
LORETTE

XLIV.—FIELD ARTILLERY SPORTS:
THE RIVAL GUN TEAMS

XLV.—AN UNDERGROUND BILLET
XLVI.—SCOTTISH PIPERS
XLVII.—A VIA DOLOROSA: MOUQUET FARM

XLVIII.—THE MEMORIAL ON THE FIELD OF
AGINCOURT

XLIX.—ON THE SEINE, BETWEEN ROUEN AND
HAVRE

L.—BLOWN UP

LI.—(a and b) A RUINED CHURCH IN THE YPRES
SALIENT: DISTANT YPRES

LII.—AN OLD BILLET
LITI.—A SUPPLY RE-FILLING POINT
LIV.—DINNER TIME: MEN OF THE R.F.A.
LV.—THE BACK GARDEN
LVI.—AN ARMY RENDEZVOUS IN FRANCE
LVII.—SPITE
LVII.—THE UNTILLED FIELDS

LIX.—MEN OF THE R.F.A. CLEANING THEIR
GUNS

LX. —AN?HO:

PRICE SIXTY CENTS VOUEN2." PARTS EE:

THE
ESTERN FRONT

DRAWINGS BY

MUIRHEAD BONE

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1917.

SOLDIER'S TRAVEL

IX of the drawings in this Part are of ships and they are their
own introduction. A soldier who does not know the life
of the sea can only say how they quicken the sense we all
have of the hardness and fineness of naval service in this

war, and of the capacity of great draughtsmanship to interpret
them ; and also of the splendid and almost unknown services of those
officers and men of the merchant marine to whose seamanship, power
of command, and habits of discipline so many soldiers torpedoed or
threatened on British transports owe their lives.

The rest of the drawings are diverse ; glimpses of the whole scene
of war in Northern France, from the front to the sea. Every place drawn
is one which a single British private might have seen on his way to
the front, in his marching to and fro behind it, at his rest billets and,
if he was hit, on his way to a home hospital. There is a fascination
of its own about a soldier’s travels in France. A fighting man, he is also
a tourist who has to settle nothing for himself. When he lands perhaps

he entrains in the dark, goes to sleep in the straw without knowing
whether the train will go North, East, or South, an hour’s run or a whole
day’s. It is like travelling on the Arabian Nights magical carpet, under
sealed orders—only he does not go quite so fast. Perhaps he awakes
in the first grey of the dawn and peers through a chink in the side of the
truck and wonders where he is. Are they the Normandy apple orchards
that he is passing, or the long chains of osier beds and water-cress
lagoons under Picardy poplars, or are the devious roads those of Flanders,
serpentining among the carefully drained fields? If he knew the
country in peace, he has great moments of recognition; “‘ Cities at
cock-crow wake before him’; he may espy, from five miles away, a
dart of carved wood that he knows for the spire of Amiens Cathedral ;
or it may be the blunt, buttressed tower of Bethune.

It is always merry travelling up to the front by day in a train. So
long as the men adhere to the train when it moves, as they take care
to do, their mode of adhesion is not so severely regulated as it is by
the bye-laws of peace. Sometimes the foot board is thronged. ‘There
is an esteemed observation post at the end of each French truck, outside,
a kind of crow’s nest attained by a ladder. Gunners like to sit in the
open, among the wheels of their lashed guns, with their legs dangling
at ease over the low gunwale of the truck. During pauses the engine-
driver is visited and some of his boiling water is diverted, by consent,
from its ordinary propulsive task to the making of tea. Or, if there
be snow on the ground, a company will fall to snowballing with the
hands of a French factory, during their dinner hour, and part, when
the train moves on, with wonderfully increased cordiality and respect
for the marksmanship of both nations.

Then comes the detraining and with it perhaps the new soldier’s
first time of hearing the guns of the front. The fussy noise of the
engine stops and the slow, rolling rumble from the eastern horizon can make
itself heard. It sounds incredible at first with its almost sleepy dignity
and its continuity ; it is to the ear what a long low range of dim blue
hills is to the eye. And then the marching through towns and country
always piquant to the foreign wayfarer, some of it written all over
with legible history, modern and old. At Hesdin the buildings change ;

UPB

the westward-rolling wave of the old Spanish power printed some trace
of its own likeness on them before it rolled back. You march on along
the line of withdrawal until, in the Grande Place at Arras, you are, as
it were, in full Spain. Or, as you march up the valleys of great French
rivers, you see how the railways cling to the western bank, keeping
the rivers between them and the eastern peril; and you think of the
German northern railways set like a flight of arrows towards the Belgian
frontier, so glaringly may the mere position of ballast and sleepers and
steel write the history of half a century of insolent menace and of
anxious self-protection.

The wounded or invalid soldier makes the reverse journey in a
world of experiences remote from anything he has known. He may
have had a few degrees of fever and awake from long nightmares of
perplexed solitary wrestling in the dark with vast fancied responsibilities
as a sentry, a runner, or a section commander, and find himself in a
bed in a rich and curious oriental double tent, the gift of a king to our
King, with a nurse accepting soothingly, in the sort of voice that he
last heard in England, his assurances that he must get on at once about
some sort of urgent trench business. ‘Then there is mere rest, profound
and unclouded and re-creating to body and mind, and then the kind
of second boyhood that comes with every good recovery from serious
illness, and then more travels ; perhaps to Versailles when the leaves
in the park are brown; perhaps to Rouen, where old France is most
French and most interwoven with Norman England ; perhaps to a hospital
among pinewoods on the dunes ; perhaps down the Seine to Havre, where
the river pilot drops into a bobbing boat and goes off to his tug and
ashore—and the next thing the British soldier may hear and see is the
quiet lapping of the ripples of Southampton Water under the stationary
ship’s bows, and Netley among the trees on the starboard side. At
any rate so it might be till the Germans treated hospital ships as fair
game and the giant red cross and long tier of green lamps became a
danger instead of a safeguard to nurses and wounded.

G. H.Q., France,
August, 1917.

LXI

SPRING IN ROLLENCOURT VILLAGE

A typical French village in a valley behind the British
front, at the time when the fruit trees begin to blossom.
In passing through the hundreds of dust-covered ruins of
villages where the Germans have been, it is almost
impossible now to conceive that each of them once presented
some such scene as this.

LXII

A SQUARE IN ARRAS

Many visitors to Arras during the war must have felt this
square to be the most melancholy place in the desolate
city. It was not ruined, but several houses were wounded
by shells, and nearly all were empty; unheeded grass
and weeds grew to extravagant heights among the stones,
as in Piranesi’s megalomaniac dreams of the Appian Way;
the obelisk in the centre seemed oddly remote from human
touch, like a peak in Darien ; and some acoustic property
of the curved facades gave a peculiar resonance to the
crash of occasional shells anywhere in the city or to
the footfalls of some wayfarer coasting cautiously
along close to the walls, to avoid enemy observation.
Until the battle of Arras was fought, the nearest enemy
trench was about 800 yards away.

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LXII
A VIEW OF ALBERT

From the West. The tree-lined road on the right is the
great Route Nationale running from Rouen through
Amiens, Albert, Pozitres, Le Sars, and Bapaume to Mons
and Valenciennes. The stretch of it seen in the drawing
was under enemy observation until the battle of the Somme
was fought. A screen used to be hung from tree to tree
on the side nearest the spectator to hide the traffic to and
from Albert. The leaning figure of the Virgin on the
church tower of Albert is seen near the centre of the
drawing.

EO ton 0 HOWE

AA A REN ee nid ne

LXIV

A RAILHEAD

One of the points from which the army at the front is
supplied with food and munitions. Some railheads are
exposed to artillery fire, and casualties to officers and
men occasionally occur as they do in the trenches, but
the work is never interrupted for more than a few hours.

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LXV
AN OFFICER’S BILLET

The house of which this is a part was built for one of
Napoleon’s generals. It is a beautiful example of the
extreme refinement of the French architecture of its time.
A British officer or man on active service is lucky indeed

when such a billet falls to him.

Ton ESS eae AS

LXVI1

A HIGHLANDS OT EICER

LXVII

HESDIN

A corner of the cheerful main square of Hesdin. On
the face of the buildings in the square may be read both
the sixteenth century origin of the little town and the
influence of the Spanish domination in the seventeenth
century. The town hall, nearly filling one side of the
square, is of a style akin to our own Jacobean; and the
quaint and rococo quality of many of the buildings has
an entertaining effect like that of delightfully odd faces.
The town has not been scarred by the war ; it is approached
from all sides by roads sloping under fine trees; it has
many gardens full of roses and on its north is an ancient
forest which still harbours wild boars.

LXVIII (a and b)

TRANSPORT HORSES IN A FRENCH
ORCHARD

The horses shown belonged to a Scottish division and
had come out of the line somewhat thin and out of con-
dition, but were recovering rapidly with rest and good
grazing. ‘The general condition of our transport horses
is one of the successes of British military organisation in
this war. It may also be boasted as some proof of
national aptitude for horsemastership, a large proportion
of the men in charge of the animals having had nothing
to do with horses before the war.

AT AN Aco. Gap UME

A corner of one of the depots to which stores are brought
by the lorries and waggons of the Army Service Corps,
thence to be distributed by the divisional transport to
the various divisions at the front.

LXIX

A RUIN AT VILLERS CARBONNEL

A point just behind the line from which the Germans
were compelled to withdraw early in 1917. It lies south-
west of Péronne and was taken over by the British from
the French in the winter of 1916-17.

.

LXX

THE QUARRY NEAR MOUQUET FARM

This hollow was the only considerable place of shelter
on the bald upland which has Mouquet Farm on its crest,
between Thiepval and Poziéres. The dug-outs seen in
the drawing were made by the Germans and afterwards
adapted and occupied by our troops. In the quarry are
many British graves. ‘The large one on the right is marked
out with shells, and much trouble has been taken to set
the cross with coloured stones. The fighting round
Mouquet Farm was some of the hardest in the battle of
the Somme.

LXXI

THE CHURCH AT FLERS

There was an extraordinary scene at Flers on September
15th, 1916, the first day when Tanks were used in war.
A British Tank, driven with enthusiasm, made its way
into Flers, ahead of the general advance, followed by a
crowd of cheering and laughing infantry, and moved up
and down the village street firing on the Germans still
in occupation. Flers is now near the centre of a wide
desert of thistles and poppies. The only living thing
seen by the artist when making his sketch was the lurking
cat gazing furtively at him from among the broken beams
of a fallen roof. Inside the ruined church some broken
images of saints have been carefully propped upright by
passing soldiers.

LXXII

IN THE SANTERRE

The fine, grave simplicity of this drawing is apt to the
broad, bare austerity of the partly derelict plateau of
Santerre, one of the most northern of the great grain
lands of France. The trenches shown were made and
first used by the French and afterwards held by British
troops. The graves of two French soldiers are seen to
the right, one of them marked with the dead man’s steel
helmet. In the distance are seen the remains of the
woods about Estrées.

LXXIII

GOOD QUARTERS

The nucleus of the mass of ruins in the drawing is a bastion
of the old chateau of Soyécourt, a village through which
the front German and Allied lines ran at the opening of
the Battle of the Somme. At the top of the pile may be
noticed an artillery observation post. ‘The security of
the quarters for troops in the cellarage is guaranteed by
the mass of débris above and by the presence of a second
exit in case the first should be blocked by the explosion
of an enemy shell.

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LXXIV

OFF HAVRE: TAKING SIRE Eien
ABOARD A HOSPITAL SHIP

Two sketches of the Seine scenery, passed by a Hospital
Ship on its journey from Rouen to Havre, were reproduced
as Plate XLIX. The present drawing shows the pilot
being taken aboard at Havre for the voyage across the
Channel. A rope ladder is thrown over the side of the
ship to his little skiff below.

LXXV

A DESTROYER AND LIGHT CRUISERS

Two types of ship which are sometimes confused by the
landsman. He might plead in excuse the frequency
with which new forms of each are evolved in the
quest for higher speed and fighting power.

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LXXVI

ON BOARD A BATTLE-CRUISER :
BETWEEN DECKS

The ship is the famous ‘“ Lion.”’ A bugler is seen in the
foreground. Soldiers on active service in this war have,
as a rule, to do without the bugle calls which mark out
every portion of their day at home. Sailors are more
fortunate, and bugle calls on board ship gain a special
beauty from some acoustic property of the surrounding
water.

LXXVII

A- DESTROYER -IN@A] HARBOUR

Every British soldier on active service in this war is
familiar with the lines of the destroyer, one of his chief
visible safeguards on his journeys overseas.

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LXXVIIl

FROM THE AFTER DECK OF A
BATTLESHIP

The drawing expresses finely the way that man and even
landscape seem to be dwarfed for the moment by one’s
sense of the massive puissance of a great battleship when
one stands on its deck.

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LXXIX

A LIGHT GRUISER: EVENING

Ours are said to be days of “floating fortresses,” but
sailors still cherish, as they have always done, the ideal
of the Ship Beautiful, and many of them find it realized
to-day in the light cruiser with her fine lines, yacht-like
lightness and great speed. They never tire of praising her.

LXXX

THE BRIDGE OF A MERCHANT
SELL aceon

The nearest figure, examining a chart, is that of an officer
who commanded a British transport, carrying troops, when
it was torpedoed by a submarine at sea. His control
of the situation, seconded by the thorough discipline of
his crew and of the troops, secured the safety of almost
everybody on board. The ship is not yet in open sea.
The pilot is conning the vessel through the port defences.
He stands close to the steersman, and both are intent on
the work of keeping the fairway. Beyond the pilot, the
officer of the watch is sweeping the distant sea horizon
with his glasses, for the enemy has a way of hanging about a
port’s approaches. An apprentice stands behind the
steersman, a sailor; on bridge look-out is posted on the
extreme wing of the bridge. The keen faces intent on
their work and look-out are typical of the Merchant Service,
without whose effort and the pitting of their skill and
seamanship against the enemy, the keen swords of Britain’s
warriors might be rusting in their island sheaths.

The Western Front

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

VOL. 2. PART IY.

LXI.—SPRING IN ROLLENCOURT VILLAGE
LXII.—A SQUARE IN ARRAS
LXIII.—A VIEW OF ALBERT
LXIV.—A RAILHEAD
LXV.—AN OFFICER’S BILLET
LXVI.—A HIGHLAND OFFICER
LXVII.—HESDIN

LXVIII.—(a and b) TRANSPORT HORSES IN A FRENCH
ORCHARD

AT AN A.S.C. DUMP
LXIX.—A RUIN AT VILLERS CARBONNEL
LXX.—THE QUARRY NEAR MOUQUETr FARM
LXXI.—THE CHURCH AT FLERS
LXXII.—IN THE SANTERRE
LXXIII.—GOOD QUARTERS

LXXIV.—OFF HAVRE: TAKING THE PILOT
ABOARD A HOSPITAL SHIP

LXXV.—A DESTROYER AND LIGHT CRUISERS

LXXVI.—ON BOARD A BATTLE-CRUISER:
BETWEEN DECKS

LXXVII—A DESTROYER IN A HARBOUR

LXXVIII.—FROM THE AFTER DECK OF A
BATTLESHIP

LXXIX.—A LIGHT CRUISER: EVENING

LXXX.—THE BRIDGE OF A MERCHANT SHIP
AT SEA

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SHIP BUILDING

ERE are drawings, if not of the Western Front, yet of

something without which there could be no Western

Front, for Britain at any rate. Mr. Bone’s art has always

delighted most in inducing mazes of intricate details to
yield effects of lucid, massive significance. His skill and his temperament
are seen at their best in these wonderful aggregations of delicate minutie
in which there is no confusion, no disproportion or indiscipline or straining
for effect, but every touch of the pencil contributes in its measure to
thrill you with the one feeling—‘t This, then, is how it is that many
millions of men, from an island surrounded with venomous perils to
ships, can carry on war overseas.”’ There is the happiest correspondence
between Mr. Bone’s art, with its splendidly generalled armies of dutiful
details, and an industry like ship building in which a puissant unity of
result is produced by the orderly joint action of multitudes of ant-like
wotkers, every one of them indispensable while every one is indescribably
dwarfed by the hugeness of that which he helps to produce.

There are some kinds of manual work in which men do not easily
take pride—work for which there is nothing to show, or only some trivial
or rubbishy thing. It is not so with the building of ships. When
the rivetter’s heater-boy said, ‘‘ Whaer wid the Loocitania hae been if it
hadna been for me heatin’ the rivets?’ he expressed a feeling that
runs through the whole of a shipbuilding yard from the Manager
down. It is a feeling that may have animated the journeyman mason
who cut stones for the Campanile at Florence or the cathedral of Rheims.
Each man or boy employed in building a liner or battleship feels himself
to be a part-author of something organic, mighty, august, with a kind
of personal life of its own and a career of high service, romance, and
adventure before it. For him it comes to the birth on the day when it
ceases to be an inert bulk of metal propped into position with hundreds
of struts and dog-shores. At last the helpless rigid mass detaches itself
quietly like an iceberg leaving the parent floe, and majestically assumes
its prerogative of riding its proper element, serene, assured, and dominant.
For the builder of ships nothing can stale the thrill of that moment
or deaden his triumphant sense of parenthood. Long after the ship has
gone out into the world from her narrow, smoky birthplace on the Tyne
or Clyde he will follow her career in the newspapers, exult in her speed
records, and hope and fear for her when disabled or overdue. The
murder of the Lusitania drew thousands of men of all kinds from all
parts of the country and Empire into the army. One hardly needs to be
told that on Clydeside there were many set jaws and lowering brows
when the news came in. Others had lost countrymen by the crime ;
the men in that shipbuilding yard had also lost a child.

The modern changes in ship building have inevitably caused the
work to gather itself into a few places. When hulls were of wood, and
steam was not yet used, almost every seaport had its own building slips,
and much of the building was done by men who would man and sail
their handiwork when built, ships’ carpenters making the hulls and
sailormen masting and rigging them. When hulls came to be made of
iron, and then of iron and steel, ship building had to go where coal and
iron were, or whither they could be easily brought. With the size of hulls
continually growing they had to be made, too, where a great ship could
be launched. The Thames, with its strong tides, drastic scour, and
splendid 30 ft. depth of channel at low water, has always had the second
of these qualifications. ‘To-day ship’s plates are delivered in London
at the same price as at Belfast and the use of electric power for driving
machine tools has made the distance from coal a less serious drawback
than before. Yet, for some reasons which are in dispute, ship building
upon the great scale has passed away from the Thames to the Tyne and

“UPB

Clyde, to Belfast and Barrow. The Clyde had the Lanarkshire iron and
coalfields to draw on, Barrow the coal and iron of Northern and Midland
England ; the Tyne had the coal on its banks and the iron within easy
reach. As to depth of water, Barrow was on the sea; the Tyne was so
shaped that it scoured itself without dredging and could easily be
canalised to give a depth of 30 feet, and the men of Glasgow and Belfast
had learnt from the history of the Dee how a precious natural creek must
be guarded from silting. When British ores began to run short a ship-
building place had to be a large seaport, able to handle great foreign
imports. For this the chief need was already supplied in each of these
places, the depth and space of water required for launching ships being
ample to float the incoming cargoes of ore. But now Glasgow and Belfast
—the latter’s ship building industry largely a kind of overflow meeting
from Glasgow—were at a new advantage. As they had been further
away than their rivals from enemy privateers in the Napoleonic wars,
so now they were nearer to America. Many other circumstances, large
and small, came in to turn a scale in favour of one or more of the elect seats
of ship building. The Clyde has a specially fine and fast measured mile
for speed trials. ‘The Tynesiders came of a race of hard-bitten frontiers-
men, people among whom an adventurous spirit, independence and
readiness to run a wise risk or take a large responsibility were in the
blood.

In most of these places the trade in ships has its own local features.
At Barrow and on the Mersey the leaning has been to the building of
warships and passenger vessels. On Tyneside the chief wares have
always been cargo boats and the builders have given more thought to
cargo-carrying power than to mere beauty of line, though every good
shipbuilder, like every sailor, loves a handsome ship. On the Clyde
they make everything—battleships, liners, tramps, ferry steamers, tugs,
motor hospital launches, and what not. And they are proud of their
versatile skill; a working shipbuilder at Glasgow will laugh at some
other place ‘‘ where they build ships by the mile and cut them off as
required.”

(For anything that is of interest in this Introduction or in the notes
to drawings in this Part, the writer is indebted to Captain D. W. Bone,
to Mr. James Bone, or to the artist.)

G.H.Q., France,
October, 1917.

LXXXI

LOWERING A BOILER INTO A SHIP

The interior of the shed shown in the drawing ‘“‘ On the
Stocks ” (XCI). The ship’s hull is complete and the time
for launching near. To lower the huge weight of the
boiler cannily into its home in the depths of the ship, a
complicated and yet primitive system of tackle is employed.
There must have been some such arrangement of straining,
adjusting, and counter-straining lines and pulleys when
Fontana raised the great obelisk in the Square of St.
Peter’s—only that then everyone present was ordered to
keep perfect silence so as ‘‘ to cause no commotion in the
air,” whereas in the building ship the clang of the hammers
is incessant,

LXXXII

THE PLATERS’ SHED

This is where the frames of the ship are cambered, or bent
to the required curve, which is indicated by marks on the
iron floor.

LXXXIIlI

ON THE DECK OF A BIG SHIP

The ship drawn here is well advanced towards completion.
The men employed on this deck are brought up to its
level on a lift. The hose-like pipes running about the
deck convey power for the pneumatic tools used by the
rivetters.

4
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LXXXIV

BUILDING A LINER

The yard shown here had gradually expanded all round
an ancient churchyard. ‘The old church can be seen on
the left, with the towering bows of the tall ship on the
stocks beetling over it.

LXXXV

A SHAFT BRACKET

The brackets, on each side of the ship, hold the twin
propeller shafts clear of the stern. ‘The view here is from
underneath.

LXXXVI

SHIPYARD SEEN FROM BIG CRANE

The drawing was made from the top of the great “‘ hammer-
headed ” crane shown in the drawing of ‘“‘ A Fitting-out
Basin ” (XC), the artist looking downward between the
flanges of the jib. The size and solidity of the walls and
bulkheads of the large ship on the stocks below make it
seem almost more like a factory in the making than a ship.

LXXXVII

THE SEVEN CRANES

The wonders of modern shipbuilding, at its highest per-
fection, are to be seen in the fine scene here drawn. On
the right a great ship is under construction. From all
directions round it the cranes are swinging its plates to
their destined places. ‘The whole place presents a rousing
spectacle of vast mechanical forces directed by human skill
to the achievement of a multitude of difficult and delicate
feats unified by one great purpose. It is like the Empire
in this war.

ea)
ity

LXXXVIII

PLACING AN OIL TANK IN A SHIP

Though less heavy than a ship’s boiler, an oil tank is a
ticklish thing to handle, and it takes some time, skill and
watchfulness to hoist it safely into a ship and bed it neatly
in its place.

LXXXIX

IN THE ENGINE SHOP

The drawing shows a set of marine engines in process of
erection in the workshop, before being installed in the
ship.

xe
A FITTING-OUT BASIN

In the fitting-out basin the machinery and heavy fittings
are installed in a ship after her launching. To lift these
great weights into the vessel there is used a ‘‘ hammer-
headed ” crane much more powerful than the cranes used
to carry material to its place on a vessel building on the
stocks.

XCI

ON THE STOCKS

A large merchant vessel is being built under a shed, to
shelter the hive of workmen beneath from the weather.
The many little railways seen in the foreground bring the
material from the ‘“‘ shops ” to the stocks.

XCIl

UNDERNEATH A SHIP

The hugeness of a modern liner’s hull is never more im-
posing than when it is seen from underneath, while still
on the stocks or in dry dock.

XCIII

BUILDING A STANDARD SHIP

‘The interior of the hull is seen from the bows. The
framing is not yet complete, and there are as yet no bulk-
heads dividing the ship into compartments.

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XCIV

THE WORKSHOP

The large machines seen in the drawing are used for giving
the required shapes to a ship’s plates. ‘This workshop, an
old one, had been half rebuilt and its two parts presented
a brilliant contrast of light and darkness, like that in
Velazquez’ ‘‘ ‘Tapestry Weavers.”

XCV

A STANDARD SHIP IN A SHIPYARD
BASIN

The standard ship is on the left. On the right are the
bows of a large merchant vessel. ‘The standard ships may
not be beautiful in their lines, but their cargo-carrying
capacity is admirable.

XCVI

A SHIPYARD

On the right a large ship is being built. In these great
yards there is constant change and improvement in the
means for handling material, and two new cranes can be
seen, partly built, in the centre of this drawing.

XCVII

YARDS ON THE CLYDE

Two distinct yards are seen alongside each other. The
quiet country scenery around them is a quite exceptional
environment for a shipyard.

IIs Z

\
BS

XCVIII

RECONSTRUCTING A SHIPYARD

An old yard in process of modernisation. While work
goes forward on a large ship, on the old stocks to the right,
new slips are being built across the old dock on the left.
‘Thus the work of shipbuilding never ceases while the whole
yard is re-made.

XCIX

READY FOR SEA

The ship shown has all but passed through the last stage
of her infancy ; to-morrow she begins her active, indepen-
dent life. ‘There is great bustle about a ship at such a
time ; her crew are busy taking stores aboard before the
shipyard workmen have put the last touches to details of
her equipment. It looks like chaos, but everything works
up perfectly to the moment when she casts off, free of the
seas.

A BIG LINER

A typical modern liner at a quayside. On the left are
some old fishing craft.

The Western Front

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
VOL. 2: PART V.

LXXXI.—LOWERING A BOILER INTO A SHIP
LXXXII.—THE PLATERS’ SHED
LXXXIII.—ON THE DECK OF A BIG SHIP
LXXXIV.—BUILDING A LINER '
LXXXV.—A SHAFT BRACKET
LXXXVI.—SHIPYARD SEEN FROM BIG CRANE
LXXXVII.—THE SEVEN CRANES
LXXXVIII.—PLACING AN OIL TANK IN A SHIP
LXXXIX.—IN THE ENGINE SHOP
XC.—A FITTING-OUT BASIN
XCI.—ON THE STOCKS
XCII.\—UNDERNEATH A SHIP
XCIII.—BUILDING A STANDARD SHIP
XCIV.—THE WORKSHOP

XCV.—A STANDARD SHIP IN A SHIPYARD
BASIN

XCVI.—A SHIPYARD
XCVII.—YARDS ON THE CLYDE
XCVIII—RECONSTRUCTING A SHIPYARD
XCIX.—READY FOR SEA
C.—A BIG LINER

Ie

Im

Contents of Volume Two

I—AT BAPAUME

Il.—THIEPVAL

III.—_THE ROAD TO PERONNE

IV.—_THE CASTLE OF PERONNE

V.—A RUINED VILLA NEAR PERONNE

VL—THE TOWN HALL OF PERONNE
VIL—RUINS OF THE CHURCH AT PERONNE
VII.—WRECKED RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE SOMME

IX.—_(A)—A RUINED VILLAGE IN FRANCE

(B)—A REST BY THE WAY
X.—A DISTANT VIEW OF VIMY RIDGE

XI.—THE FIGHT FOR LENS, FROM NOTRE DAME DE
LORETTE

XII.—DISTANT LENS, FROM NOTRE DAME DE LORETTE
XUI—THE LOOS SALIENT AND BURNING LENS

XIV.—A ROAD TO THE FRONT
A CAMP AT'A BASE

XV.—FOUCAUCOURT
XVIL—THE PIT OF MOUQUET FARM
XVII—THE GRAND MANOIR DE LIHONS
XVIHIL—THE CHURCH OF LIHONS
XIX.—THE PRIEST’S GARDEN: SPRING
XX.—A SOLDIERS’ CEMETERY
XXI.—CHATEAU NEAR BRIE
XXII.—THE GREAT CRATER, ATHIES
XXI.—THE CHURCH OF ATHIES
XXIV.—DENIECOURT CHATEAU, ESTREES
XXV.—THE ORANGERY, DENIECOURT CHATEAU
~ XXVI.—ECCE SIGNUM
XXVII.—(a and b)

A SUGAR FACTORY IN THE SANTERRE
AN OLD “0. :P.”

XXVIIT.—VILLERS CARBONNEL
XXIX.—A ROSE GARDEN
XXX.—A GERMAN H. Q.
XXXI.—THE CHATEAU FOUCAUCOURT

“ XXXIL—A RUINED TRENCH: MONT ST. ELOI IN THE DIS-
TANCE

XXXIII—_HERBECOURT CHURCH
XXXIV.—THE CHURCH OF ASSEVILLERS
XXXV.—“OUT OF THE LINB”
XXXVI—NEAR DOMPIERRE
XXXVIT—INCONNU”
XXXVITI—MAIN STREET OF FLERS: SUNSET
XXXIX.—ROUEN
XL,—ON A HOSPITAL SHIP AT NIGHT: THE ORDERLY
XLI—PANORAMA FROM THE SCHERPENBERG
XLIL—A STABLE ON THE WESTERN FRONT
XLITI—VIMY RIDGE, FROM NOTRE DAME DE LORETTE

XLIV.—FIELD ARTILLERY SPORTS; THE RIVAL GUN |

THAMS
XLV.—AN UNDERGROUND BILLET
XLVI.—SCOTTISH PIPERS
XLVIL—A- VIA DOLOROSA: MOUQUET FARM
XLVOL—A MEMORIAL ON THE FIELD OF AGINCOURT
XLIX.—ON THE SIERE, BETWEEN ROUEN AND HARVE

LXXXIIL—ON THE DECK OF A BIG SHIP

_ LXXXVIUL—PLACING AN OIL TANK IN AN BIG SH

L.—BLOWN Bess a
LI.—A RUINED CHURCH IN THE YPRES SALIENT: D
TANT YPRES 3.

LIL—AN OLD BILLET -
LII.—A SUPPLY RE-FILLING POINT
-- LIV—DINNER TIME: MEN OF THE R - Ks
LV.—THE BACK GARDEN © : 2
LVIL—AN ARMY RENDEZVOUS IN FRAN NC
LVII.—SPITE .
- LVOIL—THE UNTILLED FIELD ee s
LIX._MEN OF THE RF.A, CLEANING TAEIR GUNS
EX--AN HQ.
LXIL—SPRING IN THE “ROLLENCOURT VILLAGE
LXIL—A SQUARE IN ARRAS.
LXIII.—A VIEW OF ALBERT
-LXIV.—A RAILHEAD _ :
LXV.—AN OFFICER’S BILLET
LXVI.—A HIGHLAND OFFICER
LXVII—HESDIN ~
LXVII.—(a and b) ° k
TRANSPORT HORSES IN k PRENCH ORCHARD
AT AN AS.C. DUMP) .
LXIX.—_A RUIN AT VILLERS CARBONNEL
- LXX.—A QUARRY NEAR Ons eT 7
LXXI—THE CHURCH AT FLERS- j
LXXIL—IN THE SANTERRE ©
LXXII.—GOOD QUARTERS : .
LXXIV.—OFF HAVRE; TAKING THE ® PARROT J BOAR
PITAL SHIP =
LXXV.—A DESTROYER AND. LIGHT CRUISERS ie ‘
LXXVIL—ON BOARD A BATTLE CRUISER;. BETWEEN DE
LXXVIL—A DESTROYER IN A HARBOUR —
LXXVIII.—FROM THE AFTER DECK OF. BATTLESHIP
LXXIX.—A LIGHT CRUISER: EVENING
‘LXXX.—A BRIDGE OF A MERCHANT SHIP’ AT SEA
- LXXXIL—LOWERING A BOILER INTO A SHIP
LXXXII.—THE PLATERS’ SHED » :

LEXXIV,. —BUILDING A LINER
LXXKV.—A SHAFT BRACKET see
LXXXVI—SHIPYARD SCENE FROM BIG CRAN?

LXXXVIL—THE SEVEN CRANES BY

LXXXIX.—IN THE ENGINE SHOP
XC.—A FITTING-OUT BASIN
XCL—ON THE STOCKS
XCIL—UNDERNEATH A. SHIP
XCIIIL.—BUILDING A STANDARD, SHIP
XCIV._THE WORKSHOP. sail ee:
XCV.—A STANDARD SHIP IN A SHIP ARD BA
XCVI—A SHIPYARD® 4
XCVIL—YARDS ON THE CLYDE. seat
XCVIII.—RECONSTRUCTING A SHIPYARD
XCIXREADY FORSEA
RSA BIG LINER 5