rning farmers found their big, conical
haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the
wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes
the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to
save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too
fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.

It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open.
Occasionally one saw the hastily-made shelter-trenches of a skirmish
line; and again, the emplacements for batteries--hurried field-
emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been
open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then,
pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other
to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which
would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a
rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.

Swift marching and quick manoeuvres of the type which gave war
some of its old sport and zest; the advance all the while gathering
force like the neap tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested
wheatfield or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day's
rain will wash away bloodstains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature
hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by
his murderous wrath.

The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order.
Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the
rifles and guns and shell-fire, were moving across the fields with
spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that
were war's victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of
battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered
mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and, sometimes, when
the burying was unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes
like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that
Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to
take Paris.

Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we
have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he
was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some
man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At
one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came
running across the street at sight of him.

"Son of an old friend of mine,