ghter at the remembrance of a
moment of craftiness when he crept out of his back door and wrote a
German sentence on his front door in white chalk. It was to the effect
that the inhabitants of his house were honest folk--gute leute--who
were to be left in peace... He laughed in a high old man's treble at this
wily trick. He laughed again, until the tears came into his eyes, when
he took me to a field where the French and British had blown up 3000
German shells abandoned by the enemy at the time of their retreat.
The field was strewn with great jagged pieces of metal, and to the old
Alsatian it seemed a huge joke that the Germans had had to leave
behind so much "food for the guns." After all it was not a bad joke as
far as we are concerned.

On that Sunday in September I saw many things which helped me to
understand the meaning of war, and yet afterwards became vague
memories of blurred impressions, half obliterated by later pictures. I
remember that I saw the movements of regiments moving up to
support the lines of the Allies, and the carrying up of heavy guns for
the great battle which had now reached its sixth day, and the passing,
passing, of Red Cross trains bringing back the wounded from that
terrible front between Vic and Noyon, where the trenches were being
filled and refilled with dead and wounded, and regiments of tired men
struggled forward with heroic endurance to take their place under the
fire of those shells which had already put their souls to the test of
courage beyond anything that might be demanded, in reason, from
the strongest heart.

And through the mud and the water-pools, through the wet bracken
and undergrowth, in a countryside swept by heavy rainstorms, I went
tramping with the gravedigger, along the way of the German retreat,
seeing almost in its nakedness the black ravage of war and its foul
litter.

Here and there the highway was lined with snapped and twisted
telegraph wires. At various places great water-tanks and reservoirs
had been toppled over and smashed as though some diabolical
power had made cockshies of them. I peered down upon the broken
bridge of a railway line, and stumbled across uprooted rails torn from
their sleepers and hurled about the track.

My gravedigger plucked my sleeve and showed me where he had
buried a French cuirassier who had been shot as he kept a lonely
guard at the edge of a wood.

He pointed with his spade again at newly-made graves of French and
Briti