"Three days and how many lives?" I thought, as we approached the brick wall, "and now it is not considered of enough importance to have a single soldier on guard"; which is one of the false impressions that always comes to you after hearing that a certain point was taken at such sacrifice, and then to find that point abandoned. For the moment you seem to think of it as being typically futile of war; and then its place in the vast strategical contemplation of a battle line three hundred miles long emerges from your temporarily befogged vision. It is the military point of view to think that too much peace makes a nation soft, and you become angry at the feeling that has whispered that war is futile and forthwith you place war where the idealists forget that it belongs, not beside barbarism, but with civilization. We entered by the rusted iron gate and stood among the place of desecrated graves. But as I walked among them, their white monuments chipped with rifle balls, the leafless boughs of the great trees overspreading above splintered with shrapnel, the red wall torn open here and there to admit the shells that must have burst in that rain-filled crater by the iron-railed shaft; as I saw a clutter of rifle butts, smashed off against a tombstone, perhaps, so that the metal parts could be taken back to an ordnance factory to be molded again, I was thinking of the men who had fought here, and whether they had lived. I was wondering how many of those thick, white, bullet-chipped tombstones had shielded men from death. I was wondering how many more of them would have been killed had they fought in the open field; and as I examined the shattered granite slabs, I thought of the protection they had given. One of the staff officers was speaking to me. "Will you return to headquarters with us for tea?" he was saying, and he gave a slight shudder. Perhaps it was from the cold rain. As we motored into Vis en Artois, the sun broke through the gray-ringed dreariness of sky. Up a narrow hill street with the powerful car waking the echoes among the low white stone houses, two or three peasants in wooden shoes flattening themselves against the walls to escape the muddy spray from our tires, and we stopped in what seemed to be the village center. Down the street I could see the last hooped roof of a transport caravan, and from a stealthy creaking in the house across the street, I had an idea that shutters were being slowly pushed open and that there were frightened, bewildered eyes behind. With Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, whose French is better than mine, I crossed the street to read the proclamation--_Avis!_--pasted to the wall of a church. Worded by the Germans and signed by the French Burgomaster of Vis en Artois, it told the inhabitants what to do if they would keep out of trouble.