Only a few war-seasoned elderly men, including one in a War Office at London and one in a General Staff at Berlin and one in a Cabinet Chamber at Paris, warned their respective people to prepare themselves for a struggle bloodier, and more violent and costlier, and possibly more prolonged, than any war within the memories of living men. At first we couldn't believe that either; none of us could believe it. But those old men were right and the rest of us were wrong. The words of the war wiseacres came true. Presently we beheld enacted the intolerable situation they had predicted; and in our own country at least the tallies of dead, as enumerated in the foreign dispatches, began to mean to us only headlines on the second page of the morning paper. Then they said that when, by slaughter and maiming and incredible exertion, the manhood of Europe had been decimated to a given point the actual physical exhaustion of the combatants would force all the armies to a standstill. But the thing went on. It went on through its first year and through its second year. We saw it going on into its third year, with no sign of abatement, no evidence of a weakening anywhere among the states and the peoples immediately affected. We saw our own country drawn into it. And so, figuring what might lie in front of us and them by what laid behind, we might, without violence to credibility, figure it as going on until all of Britain's able-bodied adult male population wore khaki or had been buried in it; until sundry millions of the men of France were corpses or on crutches; until Germania had scraped and harrowed and combed her domains for cannon fodder; until Russia's countless supply of prime human grist for the red hopper of this red mill no longer was countless but countable. There is a town in the northern part of the Republic of France called Courney. Rather, I should say that once upon a time there was such a town. Considered as a town, bearing the outward manifestations of a town and nourishing within it the communal spirit of a town, it ceased to exist quite a time back. Nevertheless, it is with that town, or with the recent site of it, that this story purports to deal.