, of construction made against the
whirlwind that had come and gone.

Always, too, nothing but old men and women, these and children,
working in the broad fields, still partially cultivated, but no longer
the fields of that perfectly cared for France of the other peace days.
Women and children at the plough, old men bent double by age still
spending such strength as is left in the tasks that war has set for
them. This is the France behind the front, and, aside from the ruined
villages and graves, the France that stretches from the Pyrenees to
the Marne, a France from which youth and manhood are gone, in which
age and childhood remain with the women. Yet in this land we were
passing how much of the youth and manhood of France and Germany was
buried in the graves the crosses demonstrated at every kilometre.

But a hundred miles east of Paris there begins a new world. The
graves, the shell-cursed villages, remain, but this is no longer the
France of the Marne fighting and of the war of two years ago. At
Vitry-le-Francois you pass almost without warning into the region
which is the back of the front to-day, the base of all the line of
fire from Rheims to the Meuse, and suddenly along the road appear the
canvas guideposts which bear the terse warning, "Verdun." You pass
suddenly from ancient to contemporary history, from the killing of
other years to the killing that is of to-day--the killing and the
wounding--and along the hills where there are still graves there begin
to appear Red Cross tents and signs, and ambulances pass you bearing
the latest harvest.

And now every village is a garrison town. For a hundred miles there
have been only women and old men, but now there are only soldiers;
they fill the streets; they crowd the doorways of the houses. The
fields are filled with tents, with horses, with all the impedimenta of
an army. The whole countryside is a place of arms. Every branch of
French service is about you--Tunisians, Turcos, cavalry, the black,
the brown, and the white--the men who yesterday or last week were in
the first line, who rest and will return to-morrow or next day to
fight again.

Unmistakably, too, you feel that this is the business of war; you are
in a factory, a machine shop; if the product is death and destruction,
it is no less a matter of machinery, not of romance, of glamour. The
back of the front is a place of work and of rest for more work, but
of parade, of the brilliant, of the fascinat