The plains of Picardy over which the German offensive is now raging are not only pitted with the shell-holes and lined with the trenches of the great Somme battle of 1916, but are underlaid with the relics of a score of other conflicts fought for their possession. Julius Caesar led his legions across the the present battlefield in B.C. 57, while in pursuit of the Nervii. The Franks wrested the region from the Romans and the Northmen in turn from the Franks, sacking St. Quentin in 883 A.D. Picardy was devastated in the Hundred Years' War between France and England, and the armies of the Emperor Charles V. invaded it, besieging Peronne in 1536 and St. Quentin 21 years later. Wellington led the English army through Peronne on the way to Paris after Waterloo. The neighboring fortress of Ham, which was wrecked last spring by the Germans, was the prison of Louis Napoleon from 1840 to 1846, and from it he escaped disguised as a laborer. In January, 1871, St. Quentin, Bapaume, Ham, and Peronne were the scenes of sanguinary battles between the Germans and the French provincial armies attempting to relieve Paris.

Previous wars ended and left little trace upon the landscape of the Somme Valley. This vaster conflict, fought with a million-fold more destructive weapons, will not rely upon historians for its chronicle; like a geologic epoch, it is blasting into the countryside the ineffaceable record of its vehemence and horror.