This most dramatic photograph of the Great North Sea Battle, in which the British fleet was victor, January 24, 1915, shows the death agony of the German cruiser “Bluecher” just as she turned turtle and sank. The ship is shown lying on her side, with her machinery and armament shot into masses of twisted iron and steel, great fires raging forward, amidship and aft. The officers and men can be seen ranged along the side of the vessel: many of them have slipped into the water and may be seen swimming about. (_Copyright by the International News Service._)] “When I saw it for the first and last time it was a place of death and horror. The streets through which we passed were utterly deserted and wrecked from end to end, as though by an earthquake. Incessant explosions of shell fire crashed down upon the walls which still stood. Great gashes opened in the walls, which then toppled and fell. A roof came tumbling down with an appalling clatter. Like a house of cards blown by a puff of wind, a little shop suddenly collapsed into a mass of ruins. Here and there, further into the town, we saw living figures. They ran swiftly for a moment and then disappeared into dark caverns under toppling porticoes. They were Belgian soldiers. . . . “We stood on some steps, looking down into that cellar. It was a dark hole, illumined dimly by a lantern, I think. I caught sight of a little heap of huddled bodies. Two soldiers, still unwounded, dragged three of them out and handed them up to us. The work of getting those three men into the first ambulance seemed to us interminable; it was really no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. “I had lost consciousness of myself. Something outside myself, as it seemed, was saying that there was no way of escape; that it was monstrous to suppose that all these bursting shells would not smash the ambulance to bits and finish the agony of the wounded, and that death was very hideous. I remember thinking also how ridiculous it was for men to kill one another like this and to make such hells on earth.” CHAPTER XXII WHAT THE MEN IN THE TRENCHES WRITE HOME SOBERING REALITIES OF BATTLE--“WAR IS TERRIBLE”--THE COMMON ENEMY, DEATH--“A WASTEFUL WAR”--“SAME PAIR OF BLUE EYES”--FIGHTING WITHOUT HATE. Life at the front is not all marching and fighting by any means: there are long days and nights of waiting in which though it be “Theirs not to reason why” the soldiers have abundant time to reflect upon the grim fatality of war and the hideousness of the carnage. They are continually facing death, and though many of them, perhaps most of them, become inured to the sights of human slaughter, others cannot fail to be impressed by the stark, white faces of the fallen--friends and foes alike. Sights more horrible than perhaps they could have imagined are burned into their minds, never to be effaced.