spirit revived in
their blood. "Allons, messieurs!" said the tall major, who wanted us to
see battlefields. It required no escort to tell us where the battlefield
was. We knew it when we came to it, as you know the point reached
by high tide on the sands--this field where many Gettysburgs were
fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early
September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in
the balance--as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a
decisive victory over the French army. Where destruction ended
there the German invasion reached its limit.

Forests and streams and ditches and railway culverts played their
part in tactical surprises, as they did at Gettysburg; and cemetery
walls, too. In all my battlefield visits in Europe I have not seen a single
cemetery wall that was not loopholed. But the fences, which
throughout the Civil War offered impediment to charges and screen
to the troops which could reach them first, were missing. The fields
lay in bold stretches, because it is the business of young boys and
girls in Lorraine to watch the cows and keep them out of the corn.

We stopped at a cross-roads where charges met and wrestled back
and forth in and out of the ditches. Fragments of shells appeared as
steps scuffed away the thin coating of snow. I picked up an old
French cap, with a slash in the top that told how its owner came to his
end, and near by a German helmet. For there are souvenirs in plenty
lying in the young wheat which was sown after the battle was over.
Millions of little nickel bullets are ploughed in with the blood of those
who died to take the Kaiser to Paris and those who died to keep him
out in this fighting across the fields and through the forests, in a tug-
of-war of give-and-take, of men exhausted after nights and days
under fire, men with bloodshot eyes sunk deep in the sockets, dust-
laden, blood-spattered, with forty years of latent human powder
breaking forth into hell when the war was only a month old and
passion was at a white heat.

Hasty shelter-trenches gridiron the land; such trenches as breathless
men, dropping after a charge, threw up hurriedly with the spades that
they carry on their backs to give them a little cover. And there is the
trench that stopped the Germans--the trench which they charged but
could not take. It lies among shell-holes so thick that you can step
from one to another. In places its crest is torn away, which m