mans even then were preparing a safe place of retreat for
themselves in case their grand coup should fail, and our British troops
had to suffer from this organization on the part of an enemy which
was confident of victory but remembered the need of a safe way
back.

I have been for many strange walks in my life with strange
companions, up and down the world, but never have I gone for such
a tramp with such a guide as on this Sunday within sound of the
guns. My comrade of this day was a grave-digger.

His ordinary profession is that of a garde champetre, or village
policeman, but during the past three weeks he had been busy with
the spade, which he carried across his shoulder by my side. With
other peasants enrolled for the same tragic task he had followed the
line of battle for twenty kilometres from his own village, Rouville, near
Levignen, helping to bury the French and British dead, and helping to
burn the German corpses.

His work was not nearly done when I met him, for during the fighting
in the region round the forest of Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield,
as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then
pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left
upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops. Dig as hard as he could
my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those
brothers-in-arms who lay out in the wind and the rain.

I walked among the fields where they lay, and among their roughly
piled graves, and not far from the heaps of the enemy's dead who
were awaiting their funeral pyres.

My guide grasped my arm and pointed to a dip in the ground beyond
the abandoned village of Levignen.

"See there," he said; "they take some time to burn."

He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a gardener pointing to a bonfire
of autumn leaves.

But there in line with his forefinger rose a heavy rolling smoke,
sluggish in the rain under a leaden sky, and I knew that those leaves
yonder had fallen from the great tree of human life, and this bonfire
was made from an unnatural harvesting.

The French and British dead were laid in the same graves--"Are they
not brothers?" asked the man with the spade--and as soon as the
peasants had courage to creep back to their villages and their woods
they gathered leaves and strewed them upon those mounds of earth
among which I wandered, as heroes' wreaths. But no such honour
was paid to the enemy, and with a little petrol and straw