utters its perpetual order of the day: "Death is nothing, so long as
the Country lives. _En Avant!_"

And with that recollection goes also another, which I owe to the same
General--one of the idols of the French Army!--of a little graveyard
far up in the wilds of the Champagne battle-field--the "Cimetière de
Mont Muret," whence the eye takes in for miles and miles nothing but
the trench-seamed hillsides and the bristling fields of wire. Here on
every grave, most of them of nameless dead, collected after many
months from the vast battle-field, lie heaped the last possessions of
the soldier who sleeps beneath--his helmet, his haversack, his
water-bottle, his _spade_. These rusty spades were to me a tragic
symbol, not only of the endless, heart-wearing labour which had
produced those trenched hillsides, but also of that irony of things,
by which that very labour which protected the mysterious and spiritual
thing which the Frenchman calls _patrie_, was at the same time ruining
and sterilising the material base from which it springs--the _soil_,
which the Frenchman loves with an understanding tenacity, such as
perhaps inspires no other countryman in the world. In Artois and
Picardy our own British graves lie thickly scattered over the murdered
earth; and those of America's young and heroic dead, in the
battle-fields of Soissons, the Marne, and the Argonne, have given it,
this last year, a new consecration. But here in England our land is
fruitful and productive, owing to the pressure of the submarine
campaign, as it never was before; British farming and the American
fields have cause to bless rather than to curse the war. Only in
France has the tormented and poisoned earth itself been blasted by the
war, and only in France, even where there are no trenches, have whole
countrysides gone out of cultivation, so that in the course of a long
motor drive, the sight of a solitary plough at work, or merely a strip