ntry, ammunition
trains, caissons, transports, and cavalry, all marching endlessly
toward the booming guns to the northward.

We turned our machine to the south with a feeling of the greatest awe
at the thought of what two hundred thousand casualties must mean. We
were silent for some minutes as the machine sped along, and then
Captain Parker remarked: "At Gettysburg or at Waterloo the total
forces engaged amounted to only about one hundred and sixty thousand!"

We ran toward the slope of the plateau, passing slowly an endless,
unbroken line of transports. Beyond Bergeres-Les-Vertus an infantry
brigade was resting beside the road and the tired men were cooking and
eating.

* * * * *

We tried to comprehend the battle as a whole by studying a great many
fields, any one of which would a few years ago have been considered an
entire battle in itself. The dead were scattered far and wide; and in
the fields and among the grain-stacks the wounded cried out their
piteous faint appeals. Little groups of German stragglers were hiding
in the forests, and squads of alert French soldiers hunted them down,
beating through the cover as eager setter dogs search for grouse. In
one field of about six acres lay nine hundred German dead and wounded;
across another, where a close-action fight had raged, two hundred
French and Germans lay mixed together, all mashed and ripped. Here was
the curious sight of a German and Frenchman lying face to face, both
dead, and each one transfixed by the other's bayonet.

The very birds of the air and the beasts of the field lay dead and
rotting amid the general destruction. We saw feathers and bits of
chickens and halves of cows. On one occasion Hall maintained that "it"
had been a cow, while I thought "it" was a horse, and no piece large
enough for a certain identification could be found. Of some of the
villages which had been peaceful and beautiful a week ago, there
remained now only chimneys, ashes, and bits of walls rising from
smouldering gray debris. A French village wrecked by battle looks very
much wrecked indeed, in contrast with its habitual orderly and
toy-like appearance.

I was not so horrified in viewing these ghastly sights as I had
expected, because I could not put from me a sense of their unreality.
The human mind is incapable of comprehending to the full such terrible
happenings. One kept endlessly saying to oneself: "Can all this which
we are seein