tapping and rattling of the machine guns, and most awful of all, I think, the sudden unexpected silences, which make you hold your breath and wait—like a condemned murderer with the noose round his neck must wait on the scaffold—for the dreadful moment which you know will come when the storm will all begin over again _da capo_, and in the twinkling of an eye hundreds and hundreds of living vigorous men will be struck down dead. Mercifully few things are so false as the saying that every bullet has its billet. Otherwise not a man of the armies that fought in front of Nancy would be left. Soon after the great battle, long before nature had begun to heal the gaping wounds that French and German had made in the bosom of the brown old earth, I or my French colleague or both of us visited most of the roads north and south of the Meurthe and north and west of the Mortagne which cross the ground on which it was fought. The whole country—the once happy villages, the wooded hills and wide rolling plains of grass and stubble fields with never a hedge and hardly a ditch—is one vast field of battle and one huge cemetery. From part of it the German flood of invasion was just beginning to recede. What was left of the towns and villages and farms, which had first withstood its advance like massive breakwaters and then been submerged as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed, looked much more like piles of rugged and weather-beaten rocks than human habitations. Everywhere the fields had been drenched with the blood of French and Germans. Everywhere they were scarred with deep shell-holes surrounded by great clods of brown earth scattered in all directions. It is a characteristic feature of the Lorraine country that in many places the roads, when they run between two belts of woodland, are bordered on each side by level stretches of grass, fifty or sixty yards wide. In these roadside glades—because roads lead to towns and villages, and because armies move more easily along them than over the soft fields—the shell-holes were so close together that often they were almost touching. In other places, where only a single line of trees marked the two sides of the road, trunk after trunk had been cut straight through by the shells, or whole rows of them ruthlessly felled to open up the line of fire. And everywhere there were blown-up bridges, broken telegraph poles, hanging wires, hop-gardens scorched and withered by sheets of fire, blackened corn-stooks rotting where they stood, ploughs and farm-carts twisted and smashed, festering bodies of dead horses in hideously ungainly attitudes, rifles, bayonets, caps, helmets, coats, saddles, haversacks, socks, shirts, boots, water-bottles, all kinds of things that men have made and used and worn, all manner of rubbish that once had form and beauty—a horrible unsightly jumble and litter of wreckage and decay, a tragedy of untellable noise and fury and suffering and death. And then there were the dead themselves—the