d
for their men, still prisoners in our hands, nearly a year after the
armistice, and long after peace (a cruelty which shamed us, I think),
I remembered hundreds of French villages broken into dust by German
gun-fire, burned by incendiary shells, and that vast desert of the
battlefields in France and Belgium which never in our time will regain
its life as a place of human habitation. When Germans said, "Our
industry is ruined," "Our trade is killed," I thought of the factories
in Lille and many towns from which all machinery had been taken or in
which all machinery had been broken. I thought of the thousand crimes of
their war, the agony of millions of people upon whose liberties they had
trampled and upon whose necks they had imposed a brutal yoke. Yet even
with all those memories of tragic scenes which in this book are but
lightly sketched, I hoped that the peace we should impose would not be
one of vengeance, by which the innocent would pay for the sins of the
guilty, the children for their fathers' lust, the women for their
war lords, the soldiers who hated war for those who drove them to the
shambles; but that this peace should in justice and mercy lead the
working-people of Europe out of the misery in which all were plunged,
and by a policy no higher than common sense, but as high as that,
establish a new phase of civilization in which military force would be
reduced to the limits of safety for European peoples eager to end the
folly of war and get back to work.

I hoped too much. There was no such peace.

PART EIGHT. FOR WHAT MEN DIED

I

In this book I have written in a blunt way some episodes of the war as
I observed them, and gained first-hand knowledge of them in their
daily traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it was, nor
selected gruesome morsels and joined them together to make a jig-saw
puzzle for ghoulish delight. Unlike Henri Barbusse, who, in his dreadful
book Le Feu, gave the unrelieved blackness of this human drama, I have
here and in other books shown the light as well as the shade in which
our men lived, the gaiety as well as the fear they had, the exultation
as well as the agony of battle, the spiritual ardor of boys as well as
the brutality of the task that was theirs. I have tried to set down as
many aspects of the war's psychology as I could find in my remembrance
of these years, without exaggeration or false emphasis, so that out of
their confusion, even out