past. A tuft, perhaps thicker than the rest, is all that marks where
last year lay a British soldier whose death represented the latest
effort of the world to cross the line the Germans laid.

You cannot even know what is going on in the country beyond that line.
You have to build up a science for deducing it from little signs, as a
naturalist might study the habits of a nest of ants. The Germans are
probably much more successful at that than we are.

It is strange to us that there are towns and cities over there only a
few miles away from us, and for a hundred miles back from that, of whose
life we know nothing except that they have been ravished and ruined by
the heavy hand of Prussian militarism. But, for the people who live
around us here, it is a tragedy of which I had not the least conception
until I actually saw it.

We had a cup of coffee the other day in the house of an old lady whose
husband had been called out two years ago, a few days after the war
began.

"All my own people are over there, monsieur," she said, nodding her head
towards the lines. "They were all living in the invaded country, and I
have not heard of them for eighteen months. I do not know whether they
are alive or dead. I only know that they are all ruined. They were
farmers, monsieur, comfortably off on a big farm. But consider the fines
that the Boches have put upon the country.

"The only thing we know, monsieur, it was from a cousin who was taken
prisoner by the Boches. You know we are allowed to write to the
prisoners, and they have the privilege to write to people in the invaded