ere heaped with their dead. But what I have described
is only the beginning of the battle, and the bath was to be filled
deeper in the months that followed.

XXI

The name (that "blood-bath") and the news of battle could not be hidden
from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with horror
by the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve regiments
quartered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St. Quentin,
Cambrai, Lille, Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting to go to
the front, nor from the civil population of those towns, held for two
years by their enemy--these blond young men who lived in their houses,
marched down their streets, and made love to their women.

The news was brought down from the Somme front by Red Cross trains,
arriving in endless succession, and packed with maimed and mangled men.
German military policemen formed cordons round the railway stations,
pushed back civilians who came to stare with somber eyes at these
blanketed bundles of living flesh, but when the ambulances rumbled
through the streets toward the hospitals--long processions of them, with
the soles of men's boots turned up over the stretchers on which they lay
quiet and stiff--the tale was told, though no word was spoken.

The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and increasing anxiety,
was told clearly enough--as I read in captured letters--by the faces
of German officers who went about in these towns behind the lines with
gloomy looks, and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became irritable
and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this cursing and
bullying. A certain battalion commander had a nervous breakdown because
he had to meet his colonel in the morning.

"He is dying with fear and anxiety," wrote one of his comrades.

Other men, not battalion commanders, were even more afraid of their
superior officers, upon whom this bad news from the Somme had an evil
effect.

The bad news was spread by divisions taken out of the line and sent back
to rest. The men reported that their battalions had been cut to pieces.
Some of their regiments had lost three-quarters of their strength. They
described the frightful effect of the British artillery--the smashed
trenches, the shell-crater, the horror.

It was not good for the morale of men who were just going up there to
take their turn.

The man who was afraid of his colonel "sits all day long writing home,
with the p