fighting,
the closer in touch we got with the battle itself, the less we seemed to
see of it.

I take it this is true of nearly all battles fought under modern
military principles. Ten miles in the rear, or even twenty miles, is
really a better place to be if you are seeking to fix in your mind a
reasonably full picture of the scope and effect and consequences of the
hideous thing called war. Back there you see the new troops going in,
girding themselves for the grapple as they go; you see the
re-enforcements coming up; you see the supplies hurrying forward, and
the spare guns and the extra equipment, and all the rest of it; you see,
and can, after a dim fashion, grasp mentally, the thrusting, onward
movement of this highly scientific and most unromantic industry which
half the world began practicing in the fall of 1914.

Finally, you see the finished fabrics of the trade coming back; and by
that I mean the dribbling streams of the wounded and, in the fields and
woods through which you pass, the dead, lying in windrows where they
fell. At the front you see only, for the main part, men engaged in the
most tedious, the most exacting, and seemingly the most futile form of
day labor--toiling in filth and foulness and a desperate driven haste,
on a job that many of them will never live to see finished--if it is
ever finished; working under taskmasters who spare them not--neither do
they spare themselves; putting through a dreary contract, whereof the
chief reward is weariness and the common coinage of payment is death
outright or death lingering. That is a battle in these days; that is
war.

So twistiwise was our route, and so rapidly did we pursue it after we
left the place where we took lunch, that I confess I lost all sense of
direction. It seemed to me our general course was eastward; I
discovered afterward it was southwesterly. At any rate we eventually
found ourselves in a road that wound between high grassy banks along a
great natural terrace just below the level of the plateau in front of
Laon. We saw a few farmhouses, all desolated by shellfire and all
deserted, and a succession of empty fields and patches of woodland.
None of the natives were in sight. Through fear of prying hostile eyes,
the Germans had seen fit to clear them out of this immediate vicinity.
Anyhow, a majority of them doubtlessly ran away when fighting first
started here, three weeks earlier; the Germans had got rid of those who
remaine