onceal a
slight wound that but for the helmet had killed him.

These men were smiling as they marched; they carried their full
equipment and it rattled and tinkled; they carried their guns at all
angles, they wore their uniforms in the strangest of disorders; they
seemed almost like miners coming from the depths of the earth rather
than soldiers returning from a decisive battle, from the hell of
modern shell fire.

But it was the line on the other side of the road that held the eye.
Here were the troops that were going toward the fire, toward the
trenches, that were marching to the sound of the guns, and as one saw
them the artillery rumble took on a new distinctness.

Involuntarily I searched the faces of these men as they passed. They
were hardly ten feet from me. Platoon after platoon, company after
company, whole regiments in columns of fours. And seeing the faces
brought an instant shock; they all wore the same calm, steady,
slightly weary expression, but there was in the whole line scarcely a
young man. Here were men of the thirties, not the twenties; men still
in the prime of strength, of health, but the fathers of families, the
men of full manhood.

Almost in a flash the fact came home. This was what all the graves
along the road had meant. This was what the battlefields and the
glories of the twenty months had spelled--France had sent her youth
and it was spent; she was sending her manhood now.

In the line no man smiled and no man straggled; the ranks were closed
up and there were neither commands nor any visible sign of authority.
These men who were marching to the sound of the guns had been there
before. They knew precisely what it meant. Yet you could not but feel
that as they went a little wearily, sadly, they marched willingly.
They would not have it otherwise. Their faces were the faces of men
who had taken the full measure of their own fate.

You had a sense of the loathing, the horror, above all the sadness
that was in their hearts that this thing, this war, this destruction
had to be. They had come back here through all the waste of ruined
villages and shell-torn hillsides; all the men that you saw would not
measure the cost of a single hour of trench fighting if the real
attack began. This these men knew, and the message of the artillery
fire, which was only one of unknown terrors for you, was intelligible
to the utmost to each of them.

And yet with the weariness there was a certain resigna