y land.

He directed our chauffeur to Bapaume, across that wilderness which the
Germans had so wantonly made in their retreat to the Hindenburg line.
Nothing could have been more dismal than our slow progress in the steady
rain, through the deserted streets of this town. Home after home had
been blasted--their intimate yet harrowing interiors were revealed. The
shops and cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their walls
blown out, but in many cases the signs of the vanished and homeless
proprietors still hung above the doors. I wondered how we should feel in
New England if such an outrage had been done to Boston, for instance,
or little Concord! The church, the great cathedral on its terrace, the
bishop's house, all dynamited, all cold and wet and filthy ruins! It was
dismal, indeed, but scarcely more dismal than that which followed; for
at Bapaume we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme. And I
chanced to remember that the name had first been indelibly impressed on
my consciousness at a comfortable breakfast-table at home, where I sat
looking out on a bright New England garden. In the headlines and columns
of my morning newspaper I had read again and again, during the summer of
1916, of Thiepval and La Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Bois
des Trones. Then they had had a sinister but remote significance; now I
was to see them, or what was left of them!

As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the tragedy which had
happened here, the indigo afternoon could not have been better chosen.
Description fails to do justice to the abomination of desolation of
that vast battle-field in the rain, and the imagination, refuses to
reconstruct the scene of peace--the chateaux and happy villages, the
forests and pastures, that flourished here so brief a time ago. In my
fancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, were
for the moment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had rolled
here and extinguished all life. Beside the road only the blood-red
soil betrayed the sites of powdered villages; and through it, in every
direction, trenches had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was
torn and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing process, in its
moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus. On the hummocks were graves,
graves marked by wooden crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the
ground. Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon that
had cost