, successively, be turned over to
the American and French Governments, and visit the operations back of
their armies.

It is an amusing fact that although each detail of officers delegated
to escort the party "to the front" received the most explicit
instructions from their superior officers to take the party only to the
quiet sectors where there was no fighting going on, each detail from
the three governments successively brought the party directly under
shell-fire, and each on the first day of the "inspection." It was
unconsciously done: the officers were as much amazed to find themselves
under fire as were the members of the party, except that the latter did
not feel the responsibility to an equal degree. The officers, in each
case, were plainly worried: the editors were intensely interested.

They were depressing trips through miles and miles of devastated
villages and small cities. From two to three days each were spent in
front-line posts on the Amiens-Bethune, Albert-Peronne,
Bapaume-Soissons, St. Mihiel, and back of the Argonne sectors. Often,
the party was the first civilian group to enter a town evacuated only a
week before, and all the horrible evidence of bloody warfare was fresh
and plain. Bodies of German soldiers lay in the trenches where they
had fallen; wired bombs were on every hand, so that no object could be
touched that lay on the battle-fields; the streets of some of the towns
were still mined, so that no automobiles could enter; the towns were
deserted, the streets desolate. It was an appalling panorama of the
most frightful results of war.

The picturesqueness and romance of the war of picture books were
missing. To stand beside an English battery of thirty guns laying a
barrage as they fired their shells to a point ten miles distant, made
one feel as if one were an actual part of real warfare, and yet far
removed from it, until the battery was located from the enemy's
"sausage observation"; then the shells from the enemy fired a return
salvo, and the better part of valor was discretion a few miles farther
back.

Bok was standing talking to the commandant of one of the great French
army supply depots one morning. He was a man of forty; a colonel in
the regular French army. An erect, sturdy-looking man with white hair
and mustache, and who wore the single star of a subaltern on his
sleeve, came up, saluted, delivered a message, and then asked:

"Are there any more orders, sir?"

"