The blood of the masters is drenching the soil of France. The great academicians are willing to die that their beloved France may live. Here we stand on the battleground with this great French novelist, whose impressions are told in _Current History_. This is the first time that I have found myself so absolutely and infinitely alone, in the midst of this stage setting of immense desolation, which to-day, as it chances, is sparkling with light, and is only the more mournful for that. Until I reach the little wood to which an errand of duty calls me I need think of nothing; I need not occupy myself with anything; I need not avoid the shells, which would not give me time to avoid them, nor even choose the spot to set my foot down, since it sinks in everywhere equally. And so it comes that I drift back again to the mood of former days, to my mood of mind before the war, and all these things to which I have grown used I see and judge as though they were new. Only a score of months ago who would have imagined such a face of things? Thus, these countless excavations--white, because the soil of this region is white--excavations that stretch on all sides and which mark across the wilderness multitudes of zebra-tracings--is it possible that they mark out the only paths along which our soldiers of France can move to-day with a sort of half security?... Little sunken ways, some of them full of curves, some of them straight, which have been named "guts," and which we have had to multiply, to multiply to such a point that the earth is furrowed by them to infinity! What an enormous sum of toil they represent, these mole paths, lying in a network over hundreds of leagues! If we add the trenches, the shelter caves, all these catacombs that plunge down into the hearts of the hills, one's mind stops dead before such a total of excavation, that might seem the work of centuries. And these things that look like fishing nets stretched on all sides. If one were not informed in advance and accustomed to them, could one divine what they can possibly be? You might think that gigantic spiders had been spinning their webs among these myriads of posts, sometimes planted in straight lines, sometimes forming circles or half moons, tracing across the wide expanse designs that must be cabalistic in order better to ensnare and envelop the Barbarians. And besides they have terribly reinforced them, multiplying them twice, nay, ten times, since my last passage, these stake nets, and our web-spinning soldiers have had to make among them turnings and passages, with the enormous reels of barbed wire which they carry under their arms.