"Meine liebe Frau." Somewhere in Germany a woman was waiting for the scrap of paper, wet with dew and half obliterated by mud, which I picked up in the Forest of Compiègne She would wait week after week for that letter from the front, and day after day during those weeks she would be sick at heart because no word came, no word which would make her say, "Gott sei dank!" as she knelt by the bedside of a fair-haired boy so wonderfully like the man who had gone away to that unvermeidliche krieg which had come at last. I found hundreds of letters like this, but so soppy and trampled down that I could only read a word or two in German script. They fluttered about the fields and lay in a litter of beef-tins left behind by British soldiers on their own retreat over the same fields. Yet I picked them up and stared at them and seemed to come closer into touch with the tragedy which, for the most part, up to now, I could only guess at by the flight of fugitives, by the backwash of wounded, by the destruction of old houses, and by the silence of abandoned villages. Not yet had I seen the real work of war, or watched the effects of shell-fire on living men. I was still groping towards the heart of the business and wandering in its backyards. I came closer to the soul of war on a certain Sunday in September. By that time the enemy's retreat had finished and the German army under General von Kluck was at last on the other side of the Aisne, in the strongholds of the hills at which the French and British guns were vainly battering at the beginning of a long and dreary siege against entrenched positions. All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines, stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon and Soissons, where for six days without an hour's pause one of the greatest battles in history had continued. As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crépy-en-Valois, which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked the air with thunderous reverberations. Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease. In those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature--the spirit of these woods and hills--listened with strained ears and a frightened hush for the next report. It came louder as I advanced nearer to the firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills were falling into the deepest valleys. They were answered by vague, distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the enemy's guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they could not find the range of our own artillery.