nchitis or had
the pallor of excessive fatigue--and Napoleon would not have wished
for better fighting-men.

In the wooded country of the two "Lost Provinces" there was but little
time or chance to bury the dead encumbering the hills and fields.
Even six weeks after the beginning of the war horror made a camping
ground of the regions which lay to the east of the Meurthe, between
the villages of Blamont and Badonviller, Cirey les Forges and
Arracourt, Chateau Salins and Baudrecourt. The slopes of
Hartmansweilerkopf were already washed by waves of blood which
surged round it for nine months and more, until its final capture by the
French. St. Mihiel and Les Eparges and the triangle which the
Germans had wedged between the French lines were a shambles
before the leaves had fallen from the autumn trees in the first year of
war. In the country of the Argonne men fought like wolves and began
a guerilla warfare with smaller bodies of men, fighting from wood to
wood, from village to village, the forces on each side being scattered
over a wide area in advance of their main lines. Then they dug
themselves into trenches from which they came out at night, creeping
up to each other's lines, flinging themselves upon each other with
bayonets and butt-ends, killing each other as beasts kill, without pity
and in the mad rage of terror which is the fiercest kind of courage. In
Lorraine the tide of war ebbed and flowed over the same tracts of
ground, and neither side picked up its dead or its wounded. Men lay
there alive for days and nights, bleeding slowly to death. The hot sun
glared down upon them and made them mad with thirst, so that they
drank their own urine and jabbered in wild delirium. Some of them lay
there for as long as three weeks, still alive, with gangrened limbs in
which lice crawled, so that they stank abominably.

"I cannot tell you all the things I saw," said one of the young soldiers
who talked to me on his way back from Lorraine. He had a queer look
in his eyes when he spoke those words which he tried to hide from
me by turning his head away. But he told me how the fields were
littered with dead, decomposing and swarmed with flies, lying here in
huddled postures, yet some of them so placed that their fixed eyes
seemed to be staring at the corpses near them. And he told me how
on the night he had his own wound French and German soldiers not
yet dead talked together by light of the moon, which shed its pale light
up