approaches--it is horrible. To-morrow morning it will be seven days
since this bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer. Everything
is shot to pieces." And from another letter: "Every one of us in these
five days has become years older--we hardly know ourselves."

It was among these intricate remains of trenches and dug-outs, round the
fragments of the old chateau, that such things happened. Here, and among
those ghastly fragments of shattered woods that one sees to south and
east--Mametz, Trônes, Delville, High Wood--human suffering and heroism,
human daring and human terror, on one side and on the other, reached
their height. For centuries after the battle of Marathon sounds of armed
men and horses were heard by night; and to pry upon that sacred
rendezvous of the souls of the slain was frowned on by the gods. Only
the man who passed through innocently and ignorantly, not knowing where
he was, could pass through safely. And here also, in days to come, those
who visit these spots in mere curiosity, as though they were any
ordinary sight, will visit them to their hurt.

* * * * *

So let the first thoughts run which are evolved by this brown and torn
devastation. But the tension naturally passes, and one comes back,
first, to the _victory_--to the results of all that hard and relentless
fighting, both for the British and the French forces, on this memorable
battlefield north and south of the Somme. Eighty thousand prisoners,
between five and six hundred guns of different calibres, and more than a
thousand machine guns, had fallen to the Allies in four months and a
half. Many square miles of French territory had been recovered.
Verdun--glorious Verdun--had been relieved. Italy and Russia had been
helped by the concentration of the bulk of the German forces on the