icture of his wife and children before his eyes." He was
afraid of other things.

Bavarian soldiers quarreled with Prussians, accused them (unjustly) of
shirking the Somme battlefields and leaving the Bavarians to go to the
blood-bath.

"All the Bavarian troops are being sent to the Somme (this much is
certain, you can see no Prussians there), and this in spite of the
losses the 1st Bavarian Corps suffered recently at Verdun! And how we
did suffer!... It appears that we are in for another turn--at least the
5th Bavarian Division. Everybody has been talking about it for a long
time. To the devil with it! Every Bavarian regiment is being sent into
it, and it's a swindle."

It was in no cheerful mood that men went away to the Somme battlefields.
Those battalions of gray-clad men entrained without any of the old
enthusiasm with which they had gone to earlier battles. Their gloom was
noticed by the officers.

"Sing, you sheeps' heads, sing!" they shouted.

They were compelled to sing, by order.

"In the afternoon," wrote a man of the 18th Reserve Division, "we had
to go out again; we were to learn to sing. The greater part did not join
in, and the song went feebly. Then we had to march round in a circle and
sing, and that went no better. After that we had an hour off, and on the
way back to billets we were to sing 'Deutschland uber Alles,' but this
broke down completely. One never hears songs of the Fatherland any
more."

They were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through the streets of
French and Belgian towns to be entrained for the Somme front, for they
had forebodings of the fate before them. Yet none of their forebodings
were equal in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into which they
were flung.

The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, was a way of terror,
ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds searching
obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of human agony
could surpass these scenes along the way to the German lines round
Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, and Lesboeufs.

Many times, long before a German battalion had arrived near the
trenches, it was but a collection of nerve--broken men bemoaning
losses already suffered far behind the lines and filled with hideous
apprehension. For British long-range guns were hurling high explosives
into distant villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to rail-heads
and ammunition-dumps, while Br