e-witness I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. I saw day by
day the tidal waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred and fifty
thousand men had passed through our casualty clearing stations, and
then were not finished. I went among these men when the blood was wet
on them, and talked with hundreds of them, and heard their individual
narratives of escapes from death until my imagination was saturated
with the spirit of their conflict of body and soul. I saw a green, downy
countryside, beautiful in its summer life, ravaged by gun-fire so that
the white chalk of its subsoil was flung above the earth and grass in a
wide, sterile stretch of desolation pitted with shell-craters, ditched
by deep trenches, whose walls were hideously upheaved by explosive fire,
and littered yard after yard, mile after mile, with broken wire, rifles,
bombs, unexploded shells, rags of uniform, dead bodies, or bits of
bodies, and all the filth of battle. I saw many villages flung into ruin
or blown clean off the map. I walked into such villages as Contalmaison,
Martinpuich, Le Sars, Thilloy, and at last Bapaume, when a smell of
burning and the fumes of explosives and the stench of dead flesh rose up
to one's nostrils and one's very soul, when our dead and German dead lay
about, and newly wounded came walking through the ruins or were carried
shoulder high on stretchers, and consciously and subconsciously the
living, unwounded men who went through these places knew that death
lurked about them and around them and above them, and at any second
might make its pounce upon their own flesh. I saw our men going into
battle with strong battalions and coming out of it with weak battalions.
I saw them in the midst of battle at Thiepval, at Contalmaison, at
Guillemont, by Loupart Wood, when they trudged toward lines of German
trenches, bunching a little in groups, dodging shell-bursts, falling in
single figures or in batches, and fighting over the enemy's parapets. I
sat with them in their dugouts before battle and after battle, saw their
bodies gathered up for burial, heard their snuffle of death in hospital,
sat by their bedside when they were sorely wounded. So the full tragic
drama of that long conflict on the Somme was burned into my brain and
I was, as it were, a part of it, and I am still seared with its
remembrance, and shall always be.

But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man would be a liar if he
refused to admit the heroism, the