Here and there the highway was lined with snapped and twisted telegraph wires. At various places great water-tanks and reservoirs had been toppled over and smashed as though some diabolical power had made cockshies of them. I peered down upon the broken bridge of a railway line, and stumbled across uprooted rails torn from their sleepers and hurled about the track. My gravedigger plucked my sleeve and showed me where he had buried a French cuirassier who had been shot as he kept a lonely guard at the edge of a wood. He pointed with his spade again at newly-made graves of French and British. The graves were everywhere--mile after mile, on the slopes of the hills and in the fields and the valleys, though still on the battleground my friend had work to do. I picked up bullets from shrapnels. They are scattered like peas for fifteen miles between Betz and Mortefontaine, and thicker still along the road to Vic. The jagged pieces of shell cut my boots. I carried one of the German helmets for which the peasants were searching among cabbages and turnips. And always in my ears was the deep rumble of the guns, those great booming thunder-blows, speaking from afar and with awful significance of the great battle, which seemed to be deciding the destiny of our civilization and the new life of nations which was to come perhaps out of all this death. Chapter VI Invasion 1 Before this year has ended England will know something of what war means. In English country towns there will be many familiar faces missing, many widows and orphans, and many mourning hearts. Dimly and in a far-off way, the people who have stayed at home will understand the misery of war and its brutalities. But in spite of all our national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and Belgium. They will not know the meaning of invasion.