To move here is to move in a country of abandoned trenches, half used as graves; to move through the tainted air of the unburied; to see the countless dead, broken life, broken humanity, burning, or being thrust, with the fortunate callousness of the peasant, into trench and pit; to meet at every turn some deadly reminder of mortality; to see every house and field flecked with some pitiable wreck or litter of battle. The details need not even be imagined. But the wounded, as I saw them, returning in car and train, lying in temporary shelters or waiting their turn at wayside stations, are at once a more painful, more real reminder. British, and French, and African, side by side, patient, courageous, appreciative of the little help that can be given by the few hands. It is the one sight that can still move one--that look of youth and hope struck out of the face of the young soldier, the dulled expression, of just clinging on to consciousness of life, that alone survives. At Villers Cotterets and Crepy I saw and talked with many of them; but not for news of their exploits. We shared a common weariness of war-talk--the details were too present; and most of them characteristically, when they had asked for news about "the victory," spoke most of the peasants, and the hardship and suffering they had seen in the villages; very little about themselves or the friends they had seen killed. South of Rheims, Tuesday. With even more difficulty to-day we made our way up again into the battle region. Rheims was the first object. I managed to get to a point where I could look down and out at the city from its southern heights. Picture it for yourself, the long, rolling, wooded circle of hills, the broad green plateau of trees and houses, dipping to the irregular town; and in the centre, an immense landmark, the high, grey cathedral, with its two crowned towers of elaborate stone-work. At the first view, in the grey daylight and the roar of the wind, nothing seemed unusual. The outlines of tower and town looked as before. Then I put up the field glasses, and in a second the sight fell to pieces, with the sudden incongruousness of the destruction of Pompeii or Jerusalem as we see it on the coloured moving pictures, when the walls fall flat under red artificial flames, and in a second the towns remain only geometric sections of black ruins. The roofs were there, but shattered into dark caverns of bombardment. The gables stood, blank, and with windows transparent to the sky. The streets, scarred white or in dark hollows of crumbled brick. And the Cathedral? The walls were standing, the towers, and much of the roof, but blackened and defaced. The towers, blurred in detail and fractured. The windows, with tracery shattered, and blinking as it were painfully at the unusual daylight that streamed in upon the black ruin of the nave.