ll has indented a
huge hole in the earth. The sight of this hole renders war rather less
vague and rather less negligible.

"There are eighty thousand men in front of us," says an officer,
indicating the benign shimmering, empty landscape.

"But where?"

"Interred--in the trenches."

It is incredible.

"And the other interred--the dead?"

I ask.

"We never speak of them. But we think of them a good deal."

Still a little closer to war. The parc du genie--engineers park. BEHIND
We inspected hills of coils, formidable barbed wire, far surpassing
that of farmers, well contrived to tear to pieces any human being
who, having got into its entanglement, should try to get out again.
One thought that nothing but steam-chisels would be capable of
cutting it. Also stacks of timber for shoring up mines which sappers
would dig beneath the enemy trenches. Also sacks to be filled with
earth for improvised entrenching. Also the four-pointed contraptions
called chevaux de frise, which--however you throw them--will always
stick a fatal point upwards, to impale the horse or man who cannot
or will not look where he is going. Even tarred paper, for keeping the
weather out of trenches or anything else. And all these things in
unimagined quantities.

Close by, a few German prisoners performing sanitary duties under
a guard. They were men in God's image, and they went about on
the assumption that all the rest of the war lay before them and that
there was a lot of it. A General told us that he had mentioned to
them the possibility of an exchange of prisoners, whereupon they
had gloomily and pathetically protested. They very sincerely did not
want to go back whence they had come, preferring captivity,
humiliation, and the basest tasks to a share in the great glory of
German arms. To me they had a brutalised air, no doubt one minor
consequence of military ambition in high places.

Not many minutes away was a hospital--what the French call an
ambulance de premiere ligne, contrived out of a factory. This was
the hospital nearest to the trenches in that region, and the wounded
come to it direct from the dressing-stations which lie immediately
behind the trenches. When a man falls, or men fall, the automobile
is telephoned for, and it arrives at the appointed rendezvous
generally before the stretcher-bearers, who may have to walk for
twenty or thirty minutes over rough ground. A wounded man may
be, and has been, operated upon in this h