they were put
to the flames until only their charred ashes, windswept and wet with
heavy rain, marked the place of their death.

It is the justice of men. It makes no difference. But as I stood and
watched these smoky fires, between the beauty of great woods
stretching away to the far hills, and close to a village which seemed a
picture of human peace, with its old church-tower and red-brown
roofs, I was filled with pity at all this misery and needless death which
has flung its horror across the fair fields of France.

What was the sense of it? Why, in God's name, or the devil's, were
men killing each other like this on the fields of France, so that human
life was of no more value than that of vermin slaughtered ruthlessly?
Each one of the German corpses whose flesh was roasting under
those oily clouds of smoke had been a young man with bright hopes,
and a gift of laughter, and some instincts of love in his heart. At least
he had two eyes and a nose, and other features common to the
brotherhood of man. Was there really the mark of the beast upon him
so that he should be killed at sight, without pity? I wondered if in that
roasting mass of human flesh were any of the men who had been
kind to me in Germany--the young poet whose wife had plucked
roses for me in her garden, and touched them with her lips and said,
"Take them to England with my love"; or the big Bavarian professor
who had shared his food with me in the hills above Adrianople; or any
of the Leipzig students who had clinked glasses with me in the beer-
halls.

It was Germany's guilt--this war. Well, I could not read all the secrets
of our Foreign Office for twenty years or more to know with what tact
or tactlessness, with what honesty or charity, or with what arrogance
or indifference our statesmen had dealt with Germany's claims or
Germany's aspirations. But at least I knew, as I watched those
smouldering death-fires, that no individual corpse among them could
be brought in guilty of the crime which had caused this war, and that
not a soul hovering above that mass of meat could be made
responsible at the judgment seat of God. They had obeyed orders,
they had marched to the hymn of the Fatherland, they believed, as
we did, in the righteousness of their cause. But like the dead bodies
of the Frenchmen and the Englishmen who lay quite close, they had
been done to death by the villainy of statecraft and statesmen,
playing one race against another as we play w