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So Clote Scarpe, the great chief who was kind to all animals, gave Upweekis a soft gray coat that is almost invisible in the woods, summer or winter, and made his feet large, and padded them with soft fur; so that indeed he is like the shadows that play, for you can neither see nor hear him.
To understand properly the campaign in the Artois, it is necessary to have at least a fair knowledge of the geography and the topography of the territory between La Bassée and Arras. The valley of the Scarpe is held in on the south by low hills, and on the north by a low plateau, which descends in long ridges to the valley of the Lys and the plains about Lens.
On September 25th that is to say, the day before the British attack on the Hindenburg line, and the French and American attacks east and west of the Argonne the Intelligence Department of the French General Staff reported to Marshal Foch that since July 15th, in the Marne salient, at St. Mihiel, and in the British battles of Amiens, Bapaume, and the Scarpe, the enemy had engaged 163 divisions.
All previous battles of the Great War paled into comparative insignificance when the German offensive of 1918 opened on the Western front, March 21, with a desperate and partially successful attempt of a million men to break through the British line, attacking fiercely from the Ailette to the Scarpe, along a front of sixty miles.
Bapaume held out for five days longer while Byng pushed his right forward along the Somme towards Péronne, and extended his left attack northwards beyond the Scarpe. Byng's addition to the pressure the Germans had to bear from north of the Scarpe to south of the Oise imposed upon them a retreat as extensive as that of March and April 1917; but now they could not make it at their leisure.
Villars had found means to assemble a very numerous army, with which he encamped behind the river Sanset, in such an advantageous post as could not be attacked with any prospect of success. Meanwhile the duke of Marlborough passed the Scarpe, and formed his camp between Douay and Bouchain, where he was joined by prince Eugene on the twenty-third day of May.
Thirteen German aeroplanes and one balloon were brought down on the 26th by British aviators. On April 28, 1917, the British attacked on a front extending in an easterly direction from Vimy Ridge at its northern hinge and southward to the Scarpe River.
Counterattacks on the French front along the Chemin-des-Dames and in the region of Chevreux resulted in heavy losses to the Germans in men and guns. Toward the close of the day, May 11, 1917, the British after the hardest and most sanguinary fighting won two positions at Roeux just north of the Scarpe, and at Cavalry Farm beyond Guémappe.
If successful it would disorganize the whole German scheme of defence in the West, and would in any case tend to divert the Germans from their Italian campaign. The objective was not Cambrai itself, but to break through the Hindenburg lines as far as Bourlon and beyond, and then to take them in reverse from Bourlon westwards and northwards to the Sensée and the Scarpe.
The dugouts were everywhere, and the way the helmeted heads popped out as we passed, inquiringly, made me think of the prairie dog towns I had seen in Canada and the western United States. The river Scarpe flowed close by. It was a narrow, sluggish stream, and it did not look to me worthy of its famous name.
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