It was a little stone fountain, out of which a jet of water rose playfully, falling with a splash of water-drops into the sculptured basin. While the furnace was raging in the village this fountain played and reflected the glare of crimson light in its bubbling jet. The children of many generations had dabbled their hands in its basin. Pretty girls had peeped into their own bright eyes mirrored there. On summer days the village folk had sauntered about this symbol of grace and beauty. Now it was as though I had discovered a white Venus in the dust- heap of a burying-place. 12 The great horror of Invasion did not reach only a few villages in France and blanch the hair of only a few poor women. During the long months of this stationary war there was a long black line on all the maps, printed day after day with depressing repetition in all the newspapers of the world. But I wonder how many people understood the meaning of that black line marking the length of the German front through France, and saw in their mind's eye the blackness of all those burnt and shattered villages, for ten miles in width, on that border-line of the war trail? I wonder how many people, searching for news of heroic bayonet charges or for thrilling stories of how Private John Smith kept an army corps at bay, single-handed, with a smile on his face, saw even faintly and from afar the flight of all the fugitives from that stricken zone, the terror of women and children trapped in its hell-fire, and the hideous obscenity of that long track across the fields of France, where dead bodies lay rotting in the rain and sun and the homesteads of a simple people lay in heaps from Artois to Lorraine? Along the valley of the Aisne and of the Vesle the spirit of destruction established its kingdom. It was a valley of death. In the official reports only a few villages were mentioned by name, according to their strategical importance, but there were hundreds of hamlets, unrecorded in dispatches, which were struck by death and became the charnel-houses of bones and ruins.