kyards.

I came closer to the soul of war on a certain Sunday in September.
By that time the enemy's retreat had finished and the German army
under General von Kluck was at last on the other side of the Aisne, in
the strongholds of the hills at which the French and British guns were
vainly battering at the beginning of a long and dreary siege against
entrenched positions.

All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields
still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines,
stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon
and Soissons, where for six days without an hour's pause one of the
greatest battles in history had continued.

As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crepy-en-Valois,
which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on
through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and
stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and
British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the
north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked
the air with thunderous reverberations.

Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease. In
those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature--the spirit of
these woods and hills--listened with strained ears and a frightened
hush for the next report. It came louder as I advanced nearer to the
firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills
were falling into the deepest valleys. They were answered by vague,
distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the
enemy's guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they
could not find the range of our own artillery.

Presently, as I tramped on, splashing through water-pools and along
rutty tracks ploughed up by the wheels of gun carriages, I heard the
deeper, more sonorous booming of different guns, followed by a
percussion of the air as though great winds were rushing into void
spaces. These strange ominous sounds were caused by the heavy
pieces which the enemy had brought up to the heights above the
marshlands of the Aisne--the terrible 11-inch guns which outranged
all pieces in the French or British lines. With that marvellous foresight
which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been
embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while
their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris. The
Ger