s, in the irritation of French
talk and correspondence. And, of course, behind the bewildered and
almost helpless consciousness of such a loss in accumulated wealth as
no other European country has ever known before, there is the
ever-burning sense of the human loss which so heavily deepens and
complicates the material loss. One of the French Ministers has lately
said that France has lost three millions of population, men, women,
and children, through the war. The fighting operations alone have cost
her over a million and a half, at least, of the best manhood of France
and her Colonies. _One million and a half!_ That figure had become a
familiar bit of statistics to me; but it was not till I stood the
other day in that vast military cemetery of Chalons, to which General
Gouraud had sent me, that, to use a phrase of Keats, it was "proved"
upon "one's own pulses." Seven thousand men lie buried there, their
wreathed crosses standing shoulder to shoulder, all fronting one way,
like a division on parade, while the simple monument that faces them
utters its perpetual order of the day: "Death is nothing, so long as
the Country lives. _En Avant!_"

And with that recollection goes also another, which I owe to the same
General--one of the idols of the French Army!--of a little graveyard
far up in the wilds of the Champagne battle-field--the "Cimetiere de
Mont Muret," whence the eye takes in for miles and miles nothing but
the trench-seamed hillsides and the bristling fields of wire. Here on
every grave, most of them of nameless dead, collected after many
months from the vast battle-field, lie heaped the last possessions of
the soldier who sleeps beneath--his helmet, his haversack, his
water-bottle, his _spade_. These rusty spades were to me a tragic
symbol, not only of the endless, heart-wearing labour which had
produced those trenched hillsides, but also of that irony of things,
by which that very labour which protected the mysterious and spiritual
thing which the Frenchman calls _patrie_, was at the same time ruining
and sterilising the material base from which it springs--the _soil_,
which the Frenchman loves with an understanding tenacity, such as
perhaps inspires no other countryman in the world. In Artois and
Picardy our own British graves lie thickly scattered over the murdered
earth; and those of America's young and heroic dead, in the
battle-fields of Soissons, the Marne, and the Argonne, have given it,
this last year,