"You mean that those poor fellows will recover?" I asked. "Quite ninety per cent," he answered in his quiet, assured voice. I was shown over laundries complete in every detail; I walked through clothing stores where, in a single day, six hundred men had been equipped from head to foot; I beheld large machines for the sterilisation of garments foul with the grime of battle and other things. Truly, here, within the hospital that had grown, mushroom-like, within the wild, was everything for the alleviation of hurts and suffering more awful than our fighting ancestors ever had to endure. Presently I left this place, but now, although a clean, fresh wind blew and the setting sun peeped out, the world somehow seemed a grimmer place than ever. In the Dark Ages, humanity endured much of sin and shame and suffering, but never such as in this age of Reason and Culture. This same earth has known evils of every kind, has heard the screams of outraged innocence, the groan of tortured flesh, and has reddened beneath the heel of Tyranny; this same sun has seen the smoke and ravishment of cities and been darkened by the hateful mists of war--but never such a war as this of cultured barbarity with all its new devilishness. Shell-shock and insanity, poison gas and slow strangulation, liquid fire and poison shells. Rape, Murder, Robbery, Piracy, Slavery--each and every crime is here--never has humanity endured all these horrors together until now. But remembering by whose will these evils have been loosed upon the world, remembering the innocent blood, the bitter tears, the agony of soul and heartbreak, I am persuaded that Retribution must follow as sure as to-morrow's dawn. The evil that men do lives after them and lives on for ever. Should they, who have worked for and planned this misery, escape the ephemeral justice of man, there is yet the inexorable tribunal of the Hereafter, which no transgressor, small or great, humble or mighty, may in any wise escape. VIII THE GUNS A fine, brisk morning; a long, tree-bordered road dappled with fugitive sun-beams, making a glory of puddles that leapt in shimmering spray beneath our flying wheels. A long, straight road that ran on and on unswerving, uphill and down, beneath tall, straight trees that flitted past in never-ending procession, and beyond these a rolling, desolate countryside of blue hills and dusky woods; and in the air from beyond this wide horizon a sound that rose above the wind gusts and the noise of our going, a faint whisper that seemed in the air close about us and yet to be of the vague distances, a whisper of sound, a stammering murmur, now rising, now falling, but never quite lost.