It is overwhelming, this first glance into the enemy’s country. Spires and towers, mine-shafts and chimney-stacks, are as fingers beckoning to the Allies, pointing to them the path of duty and honour. A forest of tall factory chimneys, seen cold and smokeless in the blue of the horizon, mark where Lille waits feverishly the hour of her deliverance. From all parts of our line I have gazed long into the zone of the German Army, from the banks of the Yser Canal in the north, down to the heart of the Artois country in the south, and woven for myself mental pictures of the life of the Germans in the field, with only a hundred yards or so separating them from our lines, nearer than most of them have ever been to England or, please God, ever will be. Did ever, in the whole course of history, a hundred yards bridge a gulf so vast as that existing here--between individual liberty and chivalry and mutual forbearance, on the one hand, and, on the other, a police-controlled mentality, a blind adoration of brute force, and a cynical disregard of the teachings of Christ? With the combatants on both sides securely hidden from view deep in the ground, there is little opportunity in this siege warfare of seeing the daily life of the German at the front. A French General who had been in the field since last October jubilantly informed a friend of mine one day this summer that he had that morning seen a German for the first time. I may therefore, I presume, esteem myself fortunate to have seen quite a number of Germans in their lines in the course of my journeyings up and down the front. I shall never forget the first German I saw. It is true that he was not in the German lines, but in the British military hospital installed in the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles. It was in September, and the army was on the Aisne. This German was lying in a tent in the beautiful garden of the hotel abutting on the park of Versailles. He was dying of gangrene, and his condition made it impossible to keep him indoors in a ward with the other wounded. His bed had therefore been moved into this tent--a large, airy place. With him there was another gangrene victim, a British soldier. It was a grim and poignant meeting. A civilian doctor, who was with me, whispered, directly he saw the man and breathed the air of that tent, that the case was hopeless. The German was a thick-set, bearded Landsturm man, nearing the fifties. His face was very bronzed, and looked almost black beside the whiteness of his pillow. He was fiercely and bitterly hostile, and his eyes, already dulling with the shadow of approaching death, blazed for a moment with unconcealed enmity as he looked at the Englishman by his bedside.