The army chauffeur, ignoring the insane skidding of the car, was racing through a desolated country. It is the contrast that always catches you in this war, and in the sugar beet fields that came up to the road I began to see an increasing number of mounds, some four, some thirty feet long, incongruously protruding from the flat ground. And I began to see little wooden crosses, turned the deeper yellow that new wood turns in the rain, and some of the crosses loosened by the downpours, leaned over, their arms resting in the mud, and on one a helmet hung. On either side the unharvested fields of sugar beets had become the harvested fields of the dead.... Where I saw the white sides of a farmhouse, no smoke mounted from the gaunt, gray chimney; and in the yard beyond, no human thing moved, for we were passing through a countryside where the armies had passed. We drove on, but we could not leave the long, sinister mounds behind, and I began to think: What an awful thing it is not to be able to go a hundred yards without seeing a grave. I noticed that Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann no longer sat hunched with the blue collar of his cape turned up to his ears and staring straight ahead; restlessly he seemed ever glancing from left to right. I wondered what he, a soldier, who had been decorated for bravery in German Southwest Africa, thought of these things that he so restlessly saw. "A great battle was fought here early in October," he said, after a time. "Sixty thousand men were engaged." He paused. "There were six thousand dead. Every day for five days a hundred were wounded for each mile of a forty-mile line." That was all, but his eyes roved from grave to grave. For two miles we followed the avenue of wooden crosses and then, still in the open country, the car stopped. I saw that the car ahead with the staff officers had stopped too, and that they were getting out. "Over to the right there," said a captain, pointing towards a clump of trees through which the ruins of cottages loomed dismally in the rain, "is a village which we had to shell because the French had a position there. Then they took up positions in the cemetery," and, with a wave of his hand, the Captain indicated an ancient brick wall that had seemed to enclose a grove of tall cassia at the end of the sugar beet field. "It took us three days of hard fighting to capture the cemetery," he continued, as we waded through the mud.