The roots of our former
existence have been torn up. All one's old interests have been
buried. My wife? I hardly ever think of her. My home? Is there such a
place? It is only at night, or suddenly, sometimes, as one goes
marching with one's company that one's thoughts begin to roam back
over old grounds for a moment or two. The other fellows know what
one's silence means, and one's deafness, so that one doesn't hear a
neighbour's joke or answer his question. It gives one a horrible
heartache and one is overwhelmed with depression... Great God,
how long is this war going to last?"

21

It is only those who have been to the front in France who can realize
the life of the men there as it went on month after month--the misery of
it, the dreariness of it, the lack of any thrill except that of fear. At
the end of April in this year 1915 I went to the most desolate part
of the French front, along the battlefields of Champagne, where
after nine months of desperate fighting the guns were still at work
ceaselessly and great armies of France and Germany were still divided
from each other by a few barren meadows, a burnt wood or two, a
river bank, a few yards of trenches and a zone of Death.

It was in Champagne-Pouilleuse--mangy Champagne it is called,
because it has none of the richness of the vineyard country, but is a
great stretch of barren land through which the chalk breaks out in
bald patches. The spirit of war brooded over all this countryside, and I
passed through many ruined villages, burnt and broken by
incendiarism and shell-fire. Gradually as we approached nearer to the
front, the signs of ordinary life were left behind, and we came into a
region where all the activities of men were devoted to one
extraordinary purpose, and where they lived in strange conditions.

No civilian came this way unless as a correspondent under the
charge of a staff officer. The labourers on the roadside--carting
stones to this country of chalk--were all in uniform. No women
invaded this territory except, where, here and there, by rare chance, a
wrinkled dame drove a plough across a lonely field. No children
played about the brooks or plucked the wild flowers on the hillsides.
The inhabitants of this country were all soldiers, tanned by months of
hard weather, in war-worn clothes, dusty after marching down the
long, white roads, hard and tough in spite of a winter's misery, with
calm, resolute eyes in spite of the daily peril of dea