ind.
With such masterly thoroughness has he done his work that the spot
can never be re-peopled. The surrounding fields are too poisoned and
churned up for cultivation. The French Government plans to plant a
forest; it is all that can be done. As years go by, the kindliness
of Nature may cause her to forget and cover up the scars of hatred
with greenness. Then, perhaps, peasant lovers will wander here and
refashion their dreams of a chivalrous world. Our generation will
be dead by that time; throughout our lives this memorial to
"frightfulness" will remain.

We have left the town and are out in the open country. It is clean
and unharried. Man can murder orchards and habitations--the things
which man plants and makes; he finds it more difficult to strangle
the primal gifts of Nature. All along by the roadside the cement
telegraph-posts have been broken off short; some of them lie flat
along the ground, others hang limply in the bent shape of hairpins.
Very often we have to make a detour where a steel bridge has been
blown up; we cross the gulley over an improvised affair of struts and
planks, and so come back into the main roadway. Every now and then
we pass steam-tractors at work, ploughing huge fields into regular
furrows. The French Department of Agriculture purchased in America
nineteen teams of ten tractors apiece in the autumn of last year. The
American Red Cross has supplied others. The fields of this district
are unfenced--the farmers used to live together in villages; so
the work is made easy. It is possible to throw a number of holdings
together and to apply to France the same wholesale mechanical means
of wheat-growing that are employed on the prairies of Canada. All
the cattle and horses have been carried off into Germany. All the
farm-implements have been destroyed--and destroyed with a surprising
ingenuity. The same parts were destroyed in each instrument, so that
an entire instrument could not be reconstructed. The farms could not
have been brought under cultivation this year, had not the Government
and the Red Cross lent their assistance.

We are approaching Noyon, the birthplace of Calvin. This is one of
the few towns the Hun spared in his retreat; he spared it not out of
a belated altruism, but purely to serve his own convenience. There
were some of the French civilians who weren't worth transporting to
Germany. They would be too weak, or too old, or too young to earn
their keep when he got them ther