So at last, I turned back toward the road, and very slowly, with bowed head and shoulders that felt very old, all at once, I walked back toward the Bapaume highway.  I was still silent, and when we reached the road again, and the waiting cars, I turned, and looked back, long and sorrowfully, at that tiny hill, and the grave it sheltered.  Godfrey and Hogge and Adam, Johnson and the soldiers of our party, followed my gaze.  But we looked in silence; not one of us had a word to say.  There are moments, as I suppose we have all had to learn, that are beyond words and speech.

And then at last we stepped back into the cars, and resumed our journey on the Bapaume road.  We started slowly, and I looked back until a turn in the road hid that field with its mounds and its crosses, and that tiny cemetery on the wee hill.  So I said good-by to my boy again, for a little space.

Our road was by way of Poizieres, and this part of our journey took us through an area of fearful desolation.  It was the country that was most bitterly fought over in the summer long battle of the Somme in 1916, when the new armies of Britain had their baptism of fire and sounded the knell of doom for the Hun.  It was then he learned that Britain had had time, after all, to train troops who, man for man, outmatched his best.

Here war had passed like a consuming flame, leaving no living thing in its path.  The trees were mown down, clean to the ground.  The very earth was blasted out of all semblance to its normal kindly look.  The scene was like a picture of Hell from Dante’s Inferno; there is nothing upon this earth that may be compared with it.  Death and pain and agony had ruled this whole countryside, once so smiling and fair to see.

After we had driven for a space we came to something that lay by the roadside that was a fitting occupant of such a spot.  It was like the skeleton of some giant creature of a prehistoric age, incredibly savage even in its stark, unlovely death.  It might have been the frame of some vast, metallic tumble bug, that, crawling ominously along this road of death, had come into the path of a Colossus, and been stepped upon, and then kicked aside from the road to die.

“That’s what’s left of one of our first tanks,” said Godfrey.  “We used them first in this battle of the Somme, you remember.  And that must have been one of the very earliest ones.  They’ve been improved and perfected since that time.”

“How came it like this?” I asked, gazing at it, curiously.

“A direct hit from a big German shell—­a lucky hit, of course.  That’s about the only thing that could put even one of the first tanks out of action that way.  Ordinary shells from field pieces, machine-gun fire, that sort of thing, made no impression on the tanks.  But, of course——­”

I could see for myself.  The in’ards of the monster had been pretty thoroughly knocked out.  Well, that tank had done its bit, I have no doubt.  And, since its heyday, the brain of Mars has spawned so many new ideas that this vast creature would have been obsolete, and ready for the scrap heap, even had the Hun not put it there before its time.