A Collection of Photographs of THE WAR AREAS IN FRANCE & FLANDERS Specially taken by SIR ALEXANDER B. W. KENNEDY LL.D., F.R.S. Past President of the Institution of Civil Engineers Associate Member of the Ordnance Committee, etc. LONDON: Published at the Offices of "Country Life," Ltd., Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, W.C. 2, and by George Newnes, Ltd., Southampton Street, Strand, W.C. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons "Quand pensez-vous que la guerre sera finie?" dit le Docteur. "Qua

An official visit to the Front during the great days of October, 1918, when our chief difficulty and our great object was to keep up with the retreating Germans, gave me some first-hand knowledge of the devastation of the country which had been the result of four years of war. Familiar—too familiar—as this was to our soldiers, we at home—if I may take myself as a fair example of the average man—could really form no idea, even from the most vivid of the correspondents' descriptions, of what the r

(PLATES 1 TO 4.) On the 26th of July, 1914, on my return from a pleasant motor excursion through the Dolomites, I arrived at Innsbruck, and found the picturesquely situated old city in a state of unsuppressed excitement owing to the proclamation of war made on that day between Austria and Serbia. The crowds in the Maria Theresien Strasse were reading and discussing the proclamation ( Plate 1 ), and were obviously in excellent spirits, with no premonition of what would be the unhappy fate of thei

(PLATES 5 TO 18.) The Ypres Salient was fought over during practically the whole of the war. The first battle of Ypres, during the "race to the sea," was in October-November, 1914, when the Kaiser stayed at Thielt (twenty-five miles north-east of Ypres) for five days at the beginning of November to be ready to enter the city, only to suffer one of his many disappointments when the "old Contemptibles" kept him out. The Germans, however, got as far as Hooge, only two and a half miles away from the

(PLATES 19 TO 23.) There would be no object in recapitulating here the story of the attack on Zeebrugge on St. George's Day of 1918. Every schoolboy for generations will, it is to be hoped, know it by heart. Plate 19 shows the magnificent proportions of the canal which covers the eight miles from Bruges to Zeebrugge. It was used continuously during the war for the passage of submarines from their enormous concrete shelters at Bruges—which had resisted all the attacks of our bombers—to the sea. B

(PLATES 24 TO 34.) The region between the Ypres Salient and the La Bassée Canal, extending from the high ground by Wytschaete and Messines to Kemmel and then south-westwards by Bailleul and Meteren to Merville, and finally sharply eastwards to Festubert and Givenchy, forms the ground which the German advance in April, 1918, made into the "Lys Salient," which was to have opened the way for them to the Channel ports, and to have cut the Allied Armies in two. Neuve Chapelle lies on the main road fo

(PLATES 35 TO 42.) The pleasant little town of Bethune, with its friendly, Scotch-like name, lies just beyond the coal district, a dozen miles north-west of Lens and seven miles west of La Bassée. Our front lines during most of the war crossed the Bethune-La Bassée road about the line of Festubert and Givenchy, two and a half miles short of La Bassée. Although so near the German lines, it was not seriously shelled until the attempted German advance in March and April, 1918, when in two months th

(PLATES 43 TO 50.) Arras was in the possession of the Germans for three days in September, 1914, but they evacuated it in their retreat after the first battle of the Marne. It was only by very plucky fighting, however, that the French were able to keep them even a mile or two away, and for a long time they remained at St. Laurent-Blangy, which is practically in the north-eastern suburbs of the town. In October, 1914, therefore, they were only a couple of miles away, and from this short distance

(PLATES 51 TO 66.) I have been able to traverse several times since the war the great stretch of country in Picardy which is generally spoken of at home as "the Somme"—country over which much of our hardest fighting took place in 1916 and 1918, and where thousands of our brave men are now lying. We became only too familiar with the names of places within it, which might have peacefully remained for centuries more in the happy oblivion in which they had rested for centuries past, had not the war

(PLATES 67 TO 73.) Half a dozen miles from Amiens on the road to Albert one crosses the valley of a little stream at Pont Noyelles—an untouched valley, beautiful with tall trees and green meadows like a bit of Middlesex. The road climbs the combe on the eastern bank, and a little farther on crosses the narrow space "that just divides the desert from the sown." Onwards on the high ground from this point all greenness and beauty have disappeared, every tree has gone, and at one bound is reached th

(PLATES 74 TO 78.) In the northern outskirts of the Forest of St. Gobain, a couple of miles from the village of Crépy, and about seven miles east of La Fère and the Oise, are to be found the remains of the emplacement ( Plate 74 ) of the "Grosse Bertha," the gun which bombarded Paris from a distance of about seventy-four miles. On the spot we were told that there had been three guns, or at any rate three emplacements, but that the other emplacements were still more completely destroyed than the

(PLATES 79 TO 87.) West of Cambrai and south to St. Quentin lay over thirty miles of the strongest part of the Hindenburg Line, that "granite wall of 24,000 square kilometres." The southern end of the much-talked-of "Switch Line" at Quéant, ten miles west of Cambrai, had been forced by the First and Third Armies on the 2nd of September, 1918, but the defence was still strong, and it was only on the 10th of October that I was greeted, on arriving at Colonel Gill's quarters, with the welcome news

(PLATES 88 TO 97.) Rheims shares with Ypres and Verdun the glory of having successfully withstood a continuous four years' siege, and with Ypres the additional distinction of having been for a long time the central point in an extraordinarily narrow salient, surrounded by the enemy practically on three sides. It is truly an ancient storm centre, unsuccessfully besieged by the English in the fourteenth century, taken by them in the fifteenth (perhaps more by intrigue than by fighting), and held u

(PLATES 98 TO 106.) After the first battle of the Marne, in 1914, the Germans were driven back to positions encircling Verdun on three sides (north-west, north-east, and south-east) at a distance of ten to twelve miles. They succeeded, however, in holding a little salient at St. Mihiel, on the eastern bank of the Meuse, about twenty miles south of Verdun, and with it the village of Chauvoncourt, on the west side of the river. This village was entered by the French in November, 1914, but immediat