storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des tambours de la mort--the ruffle of the drums of death. The winding waters of the Somme flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war by Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Peronne, where dead bodies floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges and barges, and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was a highway into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving barges the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter's yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on stretchers into the wooden sheds. They were the bad cases--French boys wounded in the abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or hopelessly shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, even on the stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful anguish, or moaned like wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds spoiled the music of the lapping water and the whispering of the willows and the song of birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that vision of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched them from the bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried to the bank. I think some of them looked for their own men. One of them spoke to me one day. “That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!” “Yes. That is war, Madame.” She put a skinny hand on my arm. “Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?” “Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very old and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the lines.” “The Germans are losing many men, Monsieur?” “Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn about the fields.” “Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose their sons, as I have lost mine.” “Where was that, Madame?” “Over there.” She pointed up the Somme. “He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yesterday he lay at my breast. My man weeps for him. They were good comrades.” “It is sad, Madame.” “Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur.” “Au revoir, Madame.” XV