ey rallied and forced us back, and now it was our turn to
lose heavily. That was nearly three weeks ago, and since then the
ground over which we fought has been debatable ground, lying between our
lines and the enemy's lines--a stretch four miles long and half a mile
wide that is literally carpeted with bodies of dead men. They weren't
all dead at first. For two days and nights our men in the earthworks
heard the cries of those who still lived, and the sound of them almost
drove them mad. There was no reaching the wounded, though, either from
our lines or from the Allies' lines. Those who tried to reach them were
themselves killed. Now there are only dead out there--thousands of
dead, I think. And they have been there twenty days. Once in a while a
shell strikes that old sugar mill or falls into one of those trenches.
Then--well, then, it is worse for those who serve in the front lines."

"But in the name of God, man," I said, "why don't they call a truce--
both sides--and put that horror underground?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"War is different now," he said. "Truces are out of fashion."

I stood there and I smelled that smell. And I thought of all those
flies, and those blood-stiffened stretchers, and those little inch-long
figures which I myself, looking through that telescope, had seen lying
on the green hill, and those automobiles loaded with mangled men, and
War de Luxe betrayed itself to me. Beneath its bogus glamour I saw war
for what it is--the next morning of drunken glory.

Chapter 12

The Rut of Big Guns in France

Let me say at the outset of this chapter that I do not set up as one
professing to have any knowledge whatsoever of so-called military
science. The more I have seen of the carrying-on of the actual business
of war, the less able do I seem to be to understand the meanings of the
business. For me strategy remains a closed book. Even the simplest
primary lessons of it, the A B C's of it, continue to impress me as
being stupid, but none the less unplumbable mysteries.

The physical aspects of campaigning I can in a way grasp. At least I
flatter myself that I can. A man would have to be deaf and dumb and
blind not to grasp them, did they reveal themselves before him as they
have revealed themselves before me. Indeed, if he preserved only the
faculty of scent unimpaired he might still be able to comprehend the
thing, since, as I have said before, war in its commoner ph