ips
of shell-craters in which were bits of red rag or old bones, the red
pantaloons of the first French armies who had fought through those woods
in the beginning of the war.

I roamed about a graveyard there, where shells had smashed down some of
the crosses, but had not damaged the memorial to the men who had stormed
up the slope of Notre Dame de Lorette and had fallen when their comrades
chased the Germans to the village below.

A few shells came over the hill as I pushed through the undergrowth with
a French captain, and they burst among the trees with shattering boughs.
I remember that little officer in a steel helmet, and I could see a
Norman knight as his ancestor with a falcon as his crest. He stood so
often on the sky-line, in full view of the enemy (I was thankful for the
mist), that I admired but deplored his audacity. Without any screen to
hide us we walked down the hillside, gathering clots of greasy mud in
our boots, stumbling, and once sprawling. Another French captain joined
us and became the guide.

"This road is often 'Marmite,'" he said, "but I have escaped so often I
have a kind of fatalism."

I envied his faith, remembering two eight-inch shells which a few
minutes before had burst in our immediate neighborhood, cutting off
twigs of trees and one branch with a scatter of steel as sharp as knives
and as heavy as sledge-hammers.

Then for the first time I went into Ablain St.-Nazaire, which afterward
I passed through scores of times on the way to Vimy when that ridge was
ours. The ragged ruin of its church was white and ghostly in the mist.
On the right of the winding road which led through it was Souchez Wood,
all blasted and riven, and beyond a huddle of bricks which once was
Souchez village.

"Our men have fallen on every yard of this ground," said the French
officer. "Their bodies lie thick below the soil. Poor France! Poor
France!"

He spoke with tragedy in his eyes and voice, seeing the vision of all
that youth of France which even then, in March of '16, had been offered
up in vast sacrifice to the greedy devils of war. Rain was slashing down
now, beating a tattoo on the steel helmets of a body of French soldiers
who stood shivering by the ruined walls while trench-mortars were making
a tumult in the neighborhood. They were the men of Henri Barbusse--his
comrades. There were middle-aged men and boys mixed together in a
confraternity of misery. They were plastered with wet clay, and thei