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Updated: June 12, 2025
That was beyond his reach, and sore it must have grieved him to come to know it for come to know it he has, in France, and in Belgium, too. We passed through a wee town called Doullens on our way from Tramecourt to Albert. And there, that morn, I saw an old French nun; an aged woman, a woman old beyond all belief or reckoning. I think she is still there, where I saw her that day.
At last the buses allotted to the Divisional troops drew up and we got aboard and set off on our journey to the south. We went through Labuissière to St. Pol, and thence through Frévent to Doullens, and then north-east along the road towards Arras. Except for a few large and recent shell-holes by the roadside we saw little unusual until we began to get near Arras.
In its early stages the journey, though similar to most of the kind, produced one formidable incident, for at the top of the steep gradient between Candas and Doullens the train snapped in half; its hind portion was left poised in a cutting for an hour, until two locomotives arrived to push it on to Doullens, whither the forward half, in gay ignorance, had run.
From a rather tortuous course through bye-lanes we turned into the main Arras to Doullens road that long, straight, typical French highway with its avenue of poplars. Shortly afterwards the ambulance drew up outside the Casualty Clearing Station. The Casualty Clearing Station was situated in the grounds of a château.
Our first night we spent in Mondicourt, and then moved the next day in pouring rain to Halloy, where we stayed two days. On the 1st November we marched 14 miles through Doullens to Villers L'Hôpital, on the Auxi le Chateau road, where we found our new Padre waiting for us, the Rev. C.B.W. Buck.
Two days later, on the 28th March, we marched to Saleux and entrained for the North. Passing through Doullens we arrived at Lillers early the next morning, and marched thence to Laires, twelve miles through the driving rain. We reached billets all wet through. "B" Company followed by a later train, and joined us in billets just after midnight.
Here we met detachments of our old friends of the wood, the L.R.B., who, reduced in strength to 70 men during the Ypres fighting, had been put on lines of communication. We knew by now that our journey would take us to Doullens, a sub-prefecture of the Somme, and that we were to take over a portion of the French line.
If Arras and Vimy had not held, things would have been grave indeed. Had they been captured, says the official report of the Third Army, "our main lateral communications Amiens Doullens St. Pol St. Omer would have been seriously threatened if not cut." The Germans were determined to have them, and they fought for them with a desperate courage.
The Duc and Duchesse de Maine, whose plotting they wished to stop for the future, were arrested the duke at Sceaux, and the duchess in her house in the Rue Saint Honoré. The duke was taken to the chateau of Doullens, and the duchess to that of Dijon, and afterward to the citadel of Châlons.
She was flying straight on to Paris, and after Dunkirk came Doullens, Amiens, Creil, Saint Denis. She never left the line; and about midnight she was over the "city of light," which merits its name even when its inhabitants are asleep or ought to be. By what strange whim was it that she was stopped over the city of Paris?
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