eb of fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing
the destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads like
puppets tied to strings and made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death
which has happened before in the folly of mankind.

II

During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full
ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the laying
waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, but by
carefully organized destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly, that
it was in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is only that
our laws of war are not justified by any code of humanity above that of
primitive savages. "The decision to retreat," he says, "was not reached
without a painful struggle. It implied a confession of weakness that was
bound to raise the morale of the enemy and to lower our own. But as
it was necessary for military reasons we had no choice. It had to be
carried out... The whole movement was a brilliant performance... The
retirement proved in a high degree remunerative."

I saw the brilliant performance in its operation. I went into beautiful
little towns like Peronne, where the houses were being gutted by
smoldering fire, and into hundreds of villages where the enemy had just
gone out of them after touching off explosive charges which had made all
their cottages collapse like card houses, their roofs spread flat upon
their ruins, and their churches, after centuries of worship in them,
fall into chaotic heaps of masonry. I wandered through the ruins of
old French chateaux, once very stately in their terraced gardens, now a
litter of brickwork, broken statuary, and twisted iron--work above open
vaults where not even the dead had been left to lie in peace. I saw the
little old fruit-trees of French peasants sawn off at the base, and the
tall trees along the roadsides stretched out like dead giants to bar our
passage. Enormous craters had been blown in the roadways, which had
to be bridged for our traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the
enemy's retreat.

There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this
desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand as
before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon close
approach one saw that each house was but an empty shell blown out from
cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets of the ruins in a
silence