|AESCITIS quâ horâ fur veniet" (Ye know not in what hour the despoiler cometh) were the words of an inscription carved on the capstone of a church porch in the fifteenth century by a monkish stonecutter, overlooking a smiling valley in Picardy. That valley is now a waste place; its once populous and peaceful villages are in ruins; its fruitful orchards are gone; its murmuring streams have overflown their banks, choked with the debris of war. No church towers are visible, nor are there any forests left in the blasted expanse of shell-torn earth. The joy felt by the people of this ravaged land over the retreat of the invader, is turned to bitterness by the sight of so much wanton destruction, for they realize that this once peaceful smiling land, the richest region of France, is now a great desert waste strewn with ruins of the priceless records of her glorious achievements in the world of art. And this loss of these irreplaceable monuments is especially bitter to a people so attuned to beauty. With a contemptuous disregard for the accumulated animosity of the whole world, the Imperial high command seems bent upon leaving its hall mark upon the evacuated country. Acknowledging its inability to hold Rheims any longer, it retires its great guns to a locality from which it sends hundreds of shells crashing into that hapless town, and these are mainly aimed at the ruins of the great Cathedral. "The ruin even of ruins," cries a correspondent of the _Tribune_; adding, "In so many of the military transactions of the Hun you may perceive the hatred of humanity that actuates him, his longing to glut upon some personal victim the passion for destruction that is in his soul." Philip Gibbs, perhaps the fairest and most moderate of war correspondents, in describing the retreat of March, 1917, deals with the aspect of the country beyond the tract of shell craters, the smashed barns and country houses and churches, the tattered tree trunks, and great belts of barbed wire: "Behind the trenches are two towns and villages in which they had their 'rest billets,' and it is in these places that one sees the spirit and temper of the men whom the British are fighting. "All through this war I have tried to be fair and just to the Germans, to give them credit for their courage and to pity them because the terror of war has branded them as it has branded the British.