ew warfare that would
show it for the horror that it is; a picture that would give pause to
that certain percentage of the American people that is always so eager
to force a conservative government into conflict with other nations.

There were other things to learn. What was France doing? The great
sister republic had put a magnificent army into the field. Between
France and the United States were many bonds, much reciprocal good
feeling. The Statue of Liberty, as I went down the bay, bespoke the
kindly feeling between the two republics. I remembered Lafayette.
Battle-scarred France, where liberty has fought so hard for life--what
was France doing? Not saying much, certainly. Fighting, surely, as the
French have always fought. For certainly England, with her gallant but
at that time meagre army, was not fighting alone the great war.

But there were three nations fighting the allied cause in the west.
What had become of the heroic Belgian Army? Was it resting on its
laurels? Having done its part, was it holding an honorary position in
the great line-up? Was it a fragment or an army, an entity or a
memory?

The newspapers were full of details that meant nothing: names of
strange villages, movements backward and forward as the long battle
line bent and straightened again. But what was really happening beyond
the barriers that guarded the front so jealously? How did the men live
under these new and strange conditions? What did they think? Or fear?
Or hope?

Great lorries and transports went out from the French coast towns and
disappeared beyond the horizon; motor ambulances and hospital trains
came in with the grim harvest. Men came and, like those who had gone
before, they too went out and did not come back. "Somewhere in
France," the papers said. Such letters as they wrote came from
"somewhere in France." What was happening then, over there, beyond the
horizon, "somewhere in France"?

And now that I have been beyond the dead line many of these questions
have answered themselves. France is saying nothing, and fighting
magnificently, Belgium, with two-thirds of her army gone, has still
fifty thousand men, and is preparing two hundred thousand more.

Instead of merely an honorary position, she is holding tenaciously,
against repeated onslaughts and under horrible conditions, the flooded
district between Nieuport and Dixmude. England, although holding only
thirty-two miles of front, beginning immediately south of Ypres