r, one's brain roved over the scenes
of battle, visualizing anew, and in imagination, the agony up there, the
death which was being done by those guns, and the stupendous sum of all
this conflict. We saw, after all, only one patch of the battlefields of
the world, and yet were staggered by the immensity of its massacre,
by the endless streams of wounded, and by the growth of those little
forests of white crosses behind the fighting-lines. We knew, and could
see at any moment in the mind's eye--even in the darkness of an Amiens
night--the vastness of the human energy which was in motion along
all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the
fighting-lines, and in every village on the way the long columns of
motor-lorries bringing up food and ammunition, the trains on their
way to the army rail-heads with material of war and more food and more
shells, the Red Cross trains crowded with maimed and injured boys, the
ambulances clearing the casualty stations, the troops marching forward
from back roads to the front, from which many would never come marching
back, the guns and limbers and military transports and spare horses,
along hundreds of miles of roads--all the machinery of slaughter on
the move. It was staggering in its enormity, in its detail, and in its
activity. Yet beyond our sphere in the British section of the western
front there was the French front, larger than ours, stretching right
through France, and all their roads were crowded with the same traffic,
and all their towns and villages were stirred by the same activity and
for the same purpose of death, and all their hospitals were crammed with
the wreckage of youth. On the other side of the lines the Germans were
busy in the same way, as busy as soldier ants, and the roads behind
their front were cumbered by endless columns of transport and marching
men, and guns and ambulances laden with bashed, blinded, and bleeding
boys. So it was in Italy, in Austria, in Saloniki, and Bulgaria, Serbia,
Mesopotamia, Egypt... In the silence of Amiens by night, under the
stars, with a cool breath of the night air on our foreheads, with a
glamour of light over the waters of the Somme, our spirit was stricken
by the thought of this world-tragedy, and cried out in anguish against
this bloody crime in which all humanity was involved. The senselessness
of it! The futility! The waste! The mockery of men's faith in God!...

Often Palmer and I--dear, grave old Palm