re you will be told of
nameless atrocities and shameful killings, you will see the German
graves, marked by neat crosses, surrounded by sod embankments, marked
with plaques of black and white; the French are marked by plaques of
red, white and blue, and the latter invariably decorated with a flag
and flowers.

Once you have seen these graves by the roadside going east you will
hardly go a mile in two hundred which has not its graves. From the
environs of Meaux, a scant twenty miles from Paris, to the frontier at
the Seille, beyond Nancy, there are graves and more graves, now
scattered, now crowded together where men fought hand to hand. Passing
them in a swift-moving auto, they seem to march by you; there is the
illusion of an army advancing on the hillside, until at last, beyond
Nancy, where the fighting was so terrible, about little villages such
as Corbessaux, you come to the great common graves, where a hundred or
two hundred men have been gathered, where the trenches now levelled
are but long graves, and you read, "Here rest 179 French soldiers," or
across the road, "Here 196 Germans."

Take a map of France and from a point just south of Paris draw a
straight line to the Vosges; twenty or thirty miles to the north draw
another. Between the two is the black district of the Marne and Nancy
battles. It is the district of ruined villages, destroyed farms; it is
the region where every hillside--so it will seem to the traveller--is
marked by these pathetic crosses. It is a region in which the sense of
death and destruction is abroad. Go forty miles north again and draw
two more lines, and this is the region not of the death and
destruction of yesterday, but of to-day; this is the front, where the
graves are still in the making, the region of the Oise to the Meuse,
from Noyon to Verdun.

On this day our route led eastward through the villages which in
September, 1914, woke from at least a century of oblivion, from the
forgetting that followed Napoleon's last campaign in France to a
splendid but terrible ten days: Courtacon, Sezanne, La-Fere
Champenoise, Vitry-le-Francois, the region where Franchet d'Esperey
and Foch fought, where the "Miracle of the Marne" was performed. Mile
after mile the countryside files by, the never-changing impression of
a huge cemetery, the hugest in the world, the stricken villages, now
and then striving to begin again, a red roof here and there telling of
the first counter offensive of peace