Bisbee daily review., 1918-10-19
DOuai

headlines as a pawn in the game of war The British had stormed Vimy Ridge and driven forward in that most disastrous and costly attack on the Bullecourt line. Just ahead, beyond the ridges and ravines and wire and trenches and woods and flame and smoke of the battle line, some six or eight miles away across rolling plains and pleasant fields, with never a natural ob- stacle between, lay Douai, that ancient city, a fat and fine prize for the winner of this fight.
 But alas, the British were repulsed and later driven far back from sight of Douai and her towers.
 A year passed by and onl ly faithful few still dreamed of Douai and how near and yet so far we had been to that gentle slope that led right up to her gates. Here was mighty step on the way to the Belgian frontier, and Douai marked 1t on the map and on the landscape of war. This was the hardest step of the journey to Belgium, back over that terrible track that is marked with Mons and Charleroi and Maybeuge and Liege itself.
 Back we were pressed still further from Douai until even the dream of this fair and famous French city grew dim. Then Foch struck before Amiens, and, after we had passed Baupaume and broken that inn pregnable Queant switch-ine and passed Bullecourt of i'll omen and disaster, the van ished dream of Douai began to glow again upon the screen of the events of the war. And now for months past Douai has come again into her own in the headlines and possibilities and plans of"the conflict. We pressed on to the southeast and took Cam brai we drove wedge into Belgium; we even took Lens and threatened Lille, but Douai remained inviolate. Every day the dispatches discussed Douai and predicted her fall, and every day the faithful ones hoped on. And finally, on Thursday, the seventeenth day of October of the good year nineteen-eighteen, the allies entered Douai and the hardest step on the way to the Belgian frontier had been taken. This is the blood drenched, immortal way that the British expeditionary forces and the French army passed in the fall of nineteen fourteen. And now they are starting out to pass that way again, eastward this time, and not westward, praise be to every saint in the calendar of the old church at Rome.
 But Douai had history of its own, and a fame that has spread to the borders of Europe and far beyond among religious and thinking men hundreds of years before this war was begun. It was at Douai that the first version of the Bible used by English speak ing Catholics the world over was printed. Some twelve hundred years ago Douai be- longed to the famous and infamous counts of Flanders, and then 1t passed from them to the turbulent dukes of Burgundy, who made war upon Paris as often as they did upon foreign foes and they were making war all the time. Spain captured Douai from the Burgundians and later Louis XIV won Douai back to France and she held 1t inviolate until the Huns came in 1914.
 Douai, taken the other day by the Eng fish, has had other and many guests from England in days gone by. English, Scotch and Irish Catholics, exiled from the British Isles in the religious war, found refuge at Douai, and they enlarged and made fam ous the great university founded there by Philip of Spain years before. For cen turies Douai remained a center of learning for the English speaking priesthood of the Catholic church. The principal church and the town hall of Douai were built seven hundred years ago, and, in fact, most of the large buildings of the modern and beauti- ful Douai date back hundreds of years and still give the city, with its boulevards and gardens, an ancient appearance. That Is to say, they did, before the war. Douai to- day can only be imagined with sigh and tear, for after four years of occupation by