how they had
suffered. For every trio of living trees there seemed to be one corpse,
shattered by bombs, or blasted by evil gas. The sight of them struck at
the heart: yet they were heroes, as well as martyrs, I said to myself.
They had truly died for France, to save France. And as I thought this, I
knew that if I were a poet, beautiful words would come at my call, to
clothe my fancy about the forests.

I wanted the right words so much that it was pain when they wouldn't
answer my wish, for I seemed to hear only a faint, far-off echo of some
fine strain of music, whose real notes I failed to catch.

Always forests have fascinated me; sweet, fairy-peopled groves of my
native island, and emerald-lit beech woods of England. But I never felt
the grand meaning of forests as I felt them to-day, in this ravaged and
tortured land. I could have cried out to them: "Oh, you forests of
France, what a part you've played in the history of wars! How wise and
brave of you to stand in unbroken line, a rampart protecting your
country's frontiers, through the ages. Forests, you are bands of
soldiers, in armour of wood, and you, too, like your human brothers,
have hearts that beat and veins that bleed for France! You are soldiers,
and you are fortresses--Nature's fortresses stronger than all modern
inventions. You are fortresses to fight in; you are shelters from
air-pirates, you hide cannon; you give shelter to your fighting
countrymen from rain and heat. You delay the enemy; you mislead him, you
drive him back. When you die, deserted by the birds and all your hidden
furred and feathered children, you give yourselves--give, give to the
last! Your wood strengthens the trenches, or burns to warm the freezing
_poilus_. Brave forests, pathetic forests! I hear you defy the enemy in
your hour of death: Strike us, kill us. Still you shall never pass!"

We had felt that we knew something of the war-zone after Lorraine; but
there the great battles had all been fought in 1914, when the world was
young. Here, it seemed as if the earth must still be hot from the feet
of retreating Germans.

The whole landscape was pitted with shell-holes, and spider-webbed with
barbed wire. The three lines of French trenches we passed might, from
their look, have been manned yesterday. Piled along the neat new road
were bombs for aviators to drop; queer, fish-shaped things, and still
queerer cages they had been in. There were long, low sheds for fodder.
At each