and ears startled by fierce rumblings, he felt as though
he were living in a nightmare; and when the next minute threatened to
snap his reason or strangle his frantically pounding heart, he turned to
the driver, asking--but fearful of the answer:

"Who's winning this battle?"

It was spoken only in Hillsdale French, aided by a two months stop in
Paris; but his poilu companion smiled brightly and replied in the
average Paris English:

"Oh, Monsieur, there is now for three days what you call _moment
decalme_. Tomorrow, if no rain, _oui_!--perhaps a ver' fine battle!"

Then this was a lull!--this cannonading, that to Jeb seemed reaching
from skyline to skyline, was only a lull! Merciful God, he cried in his
soul, what might a battle be like!

By midday, after hours of frightful tugging, they were halfway on their
journey, being well out on what two weeks ago was the battle field, but
now presenting a picture of broadcast desolation. Shell craters, caused
by heavier projectiles burrowing and bursting, pockmarked the ground
like a telescopic photograph of the moon. Fields, so lately rich with
waving grain, were blasted into subsidences and cavities, bisected by
crumbled trenches before which the wreckage of barbed-wire
entanglements--a fortnight since forming barriers so impregnable as to
resemble from a distance walls of red rust--lay snarled and tied into a
million knots by the ruthless lyddite fingers.

It was a pastoral landscape distorted by the paralysis of suffering and
death, and Jeb realized that not for many years would these tortured
fields regain their tranquillity. Where were rises, now lay depressions;
the loamy top soil was blown into dust and scattered to the winds, while
sterile clay and pebbly strata had been boiled up from below to take its
place. Mixed with this mass of unprofitable earth, strewn over its
surface and buried for a depth of thirty feet, were thousands of tons of
other wire, iron stakes, and wire stanchions; cartridge cases, rifles,
and gas gongs; sand bags, iron scraps, and forge tools; steel helmets,
spades, and telephones; pieces of uniforms, water pipes, pick axes, gas
masks, binoculars, trench periscopes, blankets, surgical dressings,
boots, aye, and human bones--all, all things which the plow shares of
coming generations would be turning up to remind man (should man ever
forget) that Humanity had once been outraged by a people who, although
made in the imitation of Christ, prefe