hed by falling
timber; a child with its temple crushed by a flying stone; an
urgent amputation case, and so on. One never knows.
Bombardment, the Boche text-books say, "is designed to terrify
the civil population so that they may put pressure on their
politicians to conclude peace." In real life, men are very
rarely soothed by the sight of their women being tortured.

We took tea in the hall upstairs, with a propriety and an
interchange of compliments that suited the little occasion.
There was no attempt to disguise the existence of a
bombardment, but it was not allowed to overweigh talk of
lighter matters. I know one guest who sat through it as near
as might be inarticulate with wonder. But he was English, and
when Alan asked him whether he had enjoyed himself, he said:
"Oh, yes. Thank you very much."

"Nice people, aren't they?" Alan went on.

"Oh, very nice. And--and such good tea."

He managed to convey a few of his sentiments to Alan after
dinner.

"But what else could the people have done?" said he. "They
are French."

VI

THE COMMON TASK OF A GREAT PEOPLE

"This is the end of the line," said the Staff Officer, kindest
and most patient of chaperons. It buttressed itself on a
fortress among hills. Beyond that, the silence was more awful
than the mixed noise of business to the westward. In mileage
on the map the line must be between four and five hundred
miles; in actual trench-work many times that distance. It is
too much to see at full length; the mind does not readily
break away from the obsession of its entirety or the grip of
its detail. One visualizes the thing afterwards as a
white-hot gash, worming all across France between intolerable
sounds and lights, under ceaseless blasts of whirled dirt. Nor
is it any relief to lose oneself among wildernesses of piling,
stoning, timbering, concreting, and wire-work, or incalculable
quantities of soil thrown up raw to the light and cloaked by the
changing seasons--as the unburied dead are cloaked.

Yet there are no words to give the essential simplicity of it.
It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely
as in the Stone Age. If it goes, all that keeps us from the
Beast goes with it. One sees this at the front as clearly as
one sees the French villages behind the German lines.
Sometimes people steal away from them and bring word of what
they endure.

Where the rifle and the bayonet serve, men use those tools
along