's Effort_--broadly and sincerely, as I best could; It was
my firm confidence throughout the writing of these letters that the
friendship between Britain, France, and America--a friendship on
which, in my belief, rests the future happiness and peace of the
world--can only gain from free speech and from the free comparison of
opinion. And in the brilliant final despatch of Sir Douglas Haig which
appeared on April 12th, after six letters had been written and sent to
America, will be found, I venture to suggest, the full and
authoritative exposition of some at least of the main lines of thought
I have so imperfectly summarised in this little book.

The ten letters were written at intervals between February and May. It
seemed better, in republishing them, not to attempt much recasting.
They represent, mainly, the impressions of a journey, and of the
conversations and reading to which it led. I have left them very much,
therefore, in their original form, hoping that at least the freshness
of "things seen" may atone somewhat for their many faults.

FIELDS OF VICTORY

CHAPTER I

FRANCE UNDER THE ARMISTICE

London, _February, 1919._

A bewildering three weeks spent in a perpetually changing
scene--changing, and yet, outside Paris, in its essential elements
terribly the same--that is how my third journey to France, since the
war began, appears to me as I look back upon it. My dear
daughter-secretary and I have motored during January some nine hundred
miles through the length and breadth of France, some of it in severe
weather. We have spent some seven days on the British front, about the
same on the French front, with a couple of nights at Metz, and a
similar time at Strasburg, and rather more than a week in Paris.
Little enough! But what a time of crowding and indelible impressions!
Now, sitting in this quiet London house, I seem to be still bending
forward in the motor-car, which became a sort of home to us, looking
out, so intently that one's eyes suffered, at the unrolling scene. I
still see the grim desolation of the Ypres salient; the heaps of ugly
wreck that men call Lens and Lieviny and Souchez; and that long line
of Notre Dame de Lorette, with the Bois de Bouvigny to the west of
it--where I stood among Canadian batteries just six weeks before the
battle of Arras in 1917. The lamentable ruin of once beautiful Arras,
the desolation of Douai, and the villages between it and Valenciennes,
the wanton de