this class was in the front-line regiments. The massacre of the boys had
begun.

Then older men, men beyond middle age, who correspond to the French
Territorial class, exempted from fighting service and kept on lines of
communication, were also called to the front, and whole garrisons of
these gray heads were removed from German towns to fill up the ranks.

"The view is held here," wrote a German soldier of the Somme, "that
the Higher Command intends gradually to have more and more Landsturm
battalions (men of the oldest reserves) trained in trench warfare for
a few weeks, as we have been, according to the quality of the men, and
thus to secure by degrees a body of troops on which it can count in an
emergency."

In the month of November the German High Command believed that the
British attacks were definitely at an end, "having broken down," as they
claimed, "in mud and blood," but another shock came to them when once
more British troops--the 51st Highland Division and the 63d Naval
Division--left their trenches, in fog and snow, and captured the
strongest fortress position on the enemy's front, at Beaumont Hamel,
bringing back over six thousand prisoners. It was after that they began
their retreat.

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting
lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write.
But they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one
book, or in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the
broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock, of that
frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two million men
were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted
fields, though they led to what we called "Victory." More died there
than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old Order of the
world died there, because many men who came alive out of that conflict
were changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had
led up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings who prayed to the
same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another
except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their
philosophers, and their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the
militarism which had plunged him into that horror. The British soldier
cursed the German as the direct cause of all his trouble, but looked
back on his side of the lines and saw an evil