the last homicidal
effort of the Germans before their advance in this region curved
eastwards into a retreat. This tomb was a very impressive thing. The
driver had thrilled me again.

We drove on. We were now in a large rolling plain that sloped
gradually behind us southwards towards the Marne. It had many
little woods and spinneys, and no watercourses. To the civilian it ap-
peared an ideal theatre for a glorious sanguinary battle in which
thousands of fathers, sons, and brothers should die violently
because some hierarchy in a distant capital was suffering from an
acute attack of swelled head. A few trenches here and there could
still be descried, but the whole land was in an advanced state of
cultivation. Wheat and oats and flaming poppies had now
conquered the land, had overrun and possessed it as no Germans
could ever do. The raw earth of the trenches struggled vainly
against the tide of germination. The harvest was going to be good.
This plain, with its little woods and little villages, glittered with a
careless and vast satisfaction in the sheets of sunshine that fell out
of a blue too intense for the gaze.

We saw a few more tombs, and a great general monument or
cenotaph to the dead, constructed at cross-roads by military
engineers. The driver pointed to the village of Penchard, which had
been pillaged and burnt by the enemy. It was only about a mile off,
but in the strong, dazzling light we could distinguish not the least
sign of damage. Then we came to a farm-house by the roadside. It
was empty; it was a shell, and its roof was damaged. The Germans
had gutted it. They had taken away its furniture as booty. (What they
intended to do with furniture out of a perfectly mediocre farm-house,
hundreds of miles from home, it is difficult to imagine.) Articles which
it did not suit them to carry off they destroyed. Wine-casks of which
they could not drink the wine, they stove in. ... And then they
retreated.

This farm-house was somebody's house, just as your home is
yours, and mine mine. To some woman or other every object in it
was familiar. She glanced at the canister on the mantelpiece and
said to herself: "I really must clean that canister to-morrow." There
the house stood, with holes in its roof, empty. And if there are half a
million similarly tragic houses in Europe to-day, as probably there
are, such frequency does not in the slightest degree diminish the
forlorn tragedy of that particular house which I