e and
silence that one realized the presence of some dreadful visitation,
only that and a faint odour of corruption stealing from a dark mass of
unknown beastliness huddled under a stone wall, and the deep ruts
and holes in the roadway, made by gun-carriages and wagons.

Spent cartridges lay about, and fragments of shell, and here and
there shells which had failed to burst until they buried their nozzles in
the earth.

French peasants prowled about for these trophies, though legally
they had no right to them, as they came under the penalties attached
to loot. In many of the cottages which were used by the German
officers there were signs of a hasty evacuation. Capes and leather
pouches still lay about on chairs and bedsteads. Half finished letters,
written to women in the Fatherland who will never read those words,
had been trampled under heel by hurrying boots.

I saw similar scenes in Turkey when the victorious Bulgarians
marched after the retreating Turks. I never dreamed then that such
scenes would happen in France in the wake of a German retreat. It is
a little thing, like one of those unfinished letters from a soldier to his
wife, which overwhelms one with pity for all the tragedy of war.

"Meine liebe Frau." Somewhere in Germany a woman was waiting for
the scrap of paper, wet with dew and half obliterated by mud, which I
picked up in the Forest of Compiegne She would wait week after
week for that letter from the front, and day after day during those
weeks she would be sick at heart because no word came, no word
which would make her say, "Gott sei dank!" as she knelt by the
bedside of a fair-haired boy so wonderfully like the man who had
gone away to that unvermeidliche krieg which had come at last. I
found hundreds of letters like this, but so soppy and trampled down
that I could only read a word or two in German script. They fluttered
about the fields and lay in a litter of beef-tins left behind by British
soldiers on their own retreat over the same fields.

Yet I picked them up and stared at them and seemed to come closer
into touch with the tragedy which, for the most part, up to now, I could
only guess at by the flight of fugitives, by the backwash of wounded,
by the destruction of old houses, and by the silence of abandoned
villages. Not yet had I seen the real work of war, or watched the
effects of shell-fire on living men. I was still groping towards the heart
of the business and wandering in its bac