me tripping home, with light in their eyes, staring
about them, ejaculating pity for neighbors whose houses had been
destroyed. Then suddenly they stood outside their own house and saw that
the direct hit of a shell had knocked it to bits. The light went out
of their eyes. They stood there staring, with their mouths open... Some
Australian soldiers stood about and watched the girls, understanding the
drama.

"Bit of a mess, missy!" said one of them. "Not much left of the old
home, eh?"

The girls were amazingly brave. They did not weep. They climbed up a
hillock of bricks and pulled out bits of old, familiar things. They
recovered the whole of a child's perambulator, with its wheels crushed.
With an air of triumph and shrill laughter they turned round to the
Australians.

"Pour les bebes!" they cried.

"While there's life there's hope," said one of the Australians, with
sardonic humor.

So the martyrdom of Amiens was at an end, and life came back to the city
that had been dead, and the soul of the city had survived. I have not
seen it since then, but one day I hope I shall go back and shake hands
with Gaston the waiter and say, "Comment ca va, mon vieux?" ("How goes
it, my old one?") and stroll into the bookshop and say, "Bon jour,
mademoiselle!" and walk round the cathedral and see its beauty in
moonlight again when no one will look up and say, "Curse the moon!"

There will be many ghosts in the city at night--the ghosts of British
officers and men who thronged those streets in the great war and have
now passed on.

PART SIX. PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME

I

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come.
Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the
big battles which were being planned for them by something greater than
generalship--by the fate which decides the doom of men.

The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by
Ypres, were defensive actions of rear--guards holding the enemy back
by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race
were being raised.

The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks
which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the
science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no
meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly
mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children. They wer