lifting an elbow.

There it was, close by the roadside, and a little higher than
ourselves. The grave was marked by four short, rough posts on
which was strung barbed wire; a white flag; a white cross of painted
wood, very simply but neatly made; a faded wreath. We could
distinguish a few words of an inscription. "Comrades, 66th
Territorials..." Soldiers were buried where they fell, and this was the
tomb of him who fell nearest to Paris. It marked the last homicidal
effort of the Germans before their advance in this region curved
eastwards into a retreat. This tomb was a very impressive thing. The
driver had thrilled me again.

We drove on. We were now in a large rolling plain that sloped
gradually behind us southwards towards the Marne. It had many
little woods and spinneys, and no watercourses. To the civilian it ap-
peared an ideal theatre for a glorious sanguinary battle in which
thousands of fathers, sons, and brothers should die violently
because some hierarchy in a distant capital was suffering from an
acute attack of swelled head. A few trenches here and there could
still be descried, but the whole land was in an advanced state of
cultivation. Wheat and oats and flaming poppies had now
conquered the land, had overrun and possessed it as no Germans
could ever do. The raw earth of the trenches struggled vainly
against the tide of germination. The harvest was going to be good.
This plain, with its little woods and little villages, glittered with a
careless and vast satisfaction in the sheets of sunshine that fell out
of a blue too intense for the gaze.

We saw a few more tombs, and a great general monument or