hat staff officers do not know everything. The Germans possess half
the knowledge--and they are at great pains not to part with their half.

We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country
roads off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and
it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in
the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet
nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White-
capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the
fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops
were growing. You never tire of remarking the fact. It brings you back
from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of
life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land
keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern
France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the
soldiers of France at the front.

At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the
chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any
farther it might draw shell-fire. Army authorities know how far they
may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the
rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.

There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an
end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of
unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by. We were in a dead land.
One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction
pointed at what looked like a small miner's cabin half covered with
earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were
seeking in our progress.

It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received
us at the door of his dug-out. German guns had concentrated on a
section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was
coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an
hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent
fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his
view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from
headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his
command. His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable
law of organization kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might
have been one helpless human being in a hav