We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country roads off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White- capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops were growing. You never tire of remarking the fact. It brings you back from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the soldiers of France at the front. At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any farther it might draw shell-fire. Army authorities know how far they may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance. There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by. We were in a dead land. One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction pointed at what looked like a small miner's cabin half covered with earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were seeking in our progress. It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received us at the door of his dug-out. German guns had concentrated on a section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his command. His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable law of organization kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might have been one helpless human being in a havoc of shells which had cut the wires. His place was where he could be in touch with his subordinates and his superiors. True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and his section was the short cut. Modesty was not the only reason for not taking it. As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in the ditch. I judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a concealed trench would suffer after we had passed on.