ace and chilled you to the bone. All
you saw depressed and chilled your spirit.

To the "poilus," who, in the face of such desolation, joked and laughed
with the civilians, you felt you owed an apology, for your automobile
was waiting to whisk you back to a warm dinner, electric lights, red
wine, and a dry bed. The men we met were cavemen. When night came they
would sleep in a hole in the hill fit for a mud-turtle or a muskrat.

They moved in streets of clay two feet across. They were as far removed
from civilization, as in the past they have known it, as though they had
been cast adrift upon an island of liquid mud. Wherever they looked was
desolation, ruins, and broken walls, jumbles of bricks, tunnels in mud,
caves in mud, graves in mud.

In other wars the "front" was something almost human. It advanced,
wavered, and withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was electrified. It
remained in no fixed place, but, like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with
galloping horses and cheering men overwhelmed a valley. In comparison,
this trench work did not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of a
mining-camp during the spring freshet, and for all the attention the
cavemen paid to them, the reports of their "seventy-fives" and the "Jack
Johnsons" of the enemy bursting on Mont de Lorette might have come from
miners blasting rock.

What we saw of these cave-dwellers was only a few feet of a moat that
for three hundred miles like a miniature canal is cut across France.
Where we stood we could see of the three hundred miles only mud walls,
so close that we brushed one with each elbow. By looking up we could
see the black, leaden sky. Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an arrow
pointed to a first-aid dressing-station. Behind us was the winding
entrance to a shelter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement and
corrugated iron, and lit by a candle.

From a trench that was all we could see of the war, and that is all
millions of fighting men see of it--wet walls of clay as narrow as a
grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital, earthen steps leading to a
shelter from sudden death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky and perhaps
a great bird at which the enemy is shooting snowballs.

In northern France there are many buried towns and villages. They are
buried in their own cellars. Arras is still uninterred. She is the
corpse of a city that waits for burial, and day by day the German shells
are trying to dig her grave. They were at it yesterday whe