My gravedigger plucked my sleeve and showed me where he had buried a French cuirassier who had been shot as he kept a lonely guard at the edge of a wood.

He pointed with his spade again at newly-made graves of French and British.  The graves were everywhere—­mile after mile, on the slopes of the hills and in the fields and the valleys, though still on the battleground my friend had work to do.

I picked up bullets from shrapnels.  They are scattered like peas for fifteen miles between Betz and Mortefontaine, and thicker still along the road to Vic.  The jagged pieces of shell cut my boots.  I carried one of the German helmets for which the peasants were searching among cabbages and turnips.  And always in my ears was the deep rumble of the guns, those great booming thunder-blows, speaking from afar and with awful significance of the great battle, which seemed to be deciding the destiny of our civilization and the new life of nations which was to come perhaps out of all this death.

Chapter VI Invasion

1

Before this year has ended England will know something of what war means.  In English country towns there will be many familiar faces missing, many widows and orphans, and many mourning hearts.  Dimly and in a far-off way, the people who have stayed at home will understand the misery of war and its brutalities.  But in spite of all our national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and Belgium.  They will not know the meaning of invasion.

It is a great luck to be born in an island.  The girdle of sea is a safeguard which gives a sense of security to the whole psychology of a race, and for that reason there is a gulf of ignorance about the terrors of war which, happily, may never be bridged by the collective imagination of English and Scottish people.  A continental nation, divided by a few hills, a river, or a line on the map, from another race with other instincts and ideals, is haunted throughout its history by a sense of peril.  Even in times of profound peace, the thought is there, in the background, with a continual menace.  It shapes the character of a people and enters into all their political and educational progress.  To keep on friendly terms with a powerful next-door neighbour, or to build defensive works high enough to make hostility a safe game, is the lifework of its statesmen and its politicians.  Great crises and agitations shake the nation convulsively when cowardice or treachery or laziness has allowed that boundary wall to crumble or has made a breach in it.  The violence of the Dreyfus affair was not so much due to a Catholic detestation of the Jewish race, but in its root-instincts to a fear of the German people over the frontier making use of French corruption to sap the defensive works which had been raised against them.