God's great eternity, will ever restore to one mother her uselessly
sacrificed son; will quicken one of the figures that lie rotting along
the battle line; will heal this scar that extends, yellow and blue and
red and black, across the heart of Western Europe.

It is a long scar--long and irregular. It begins at Nieuport, on the
North Sea, extends south to the region of Soissons, east to Verdun,
and then irregularly southeast to the Swiss border.

The map from which I am working was coloured and marked for me by
General Foch, commander of the French Army of the North, at his
headquarters. It is a little map, and so this line, which crosses
empires and cuts civilisation in half, is only fourteen inches long,
although it represents a battle line of over four hundred miles. Of
this the Belgian front is one-half inch, or approximately
one-twenty-eighth. The British front is a trifle more than twice as
long. All the rest of that line is red--French.

That is the most impressive thing about the map, the length of the
French line.

With the arrival of Kitchener's army this last spring the blue portion
grew somewhat. The yellow remained as it was, for the Belgian
casualties have been two-thirds of her army. There have been many
tragedies in Belgium. That is one of them.

In the very north then, yellow; then a bit of red; below that blue;
then red again in that long sweeping curve that is the French front.
Occasionally the line moves a trifle forward or back, like the
shifting record of a fever chart; but in general it remains the same.