[Footnote 1:  Since this was written and just as I am returning to the front, the Hun has set to work to create this hell for the second time.  Most of the places referred to below are once more within the enemy country and all the mercy of the American Red Cross has been wiped out.]

I started out on my trip in a staff-car from a city well behind the lines.  In the first half hour of the journey the country was green and pleasant.  We passed some cavalry officers galloping across a brown field; birds were battling against a flurrying wind; high overhead an aeroplane sailed serenely.  There was a sense of life, motion and exhilaration abroad, but only for the first half hour of our journey.  Then momentarily a depression grew up about us.  Fields and trees were becoming dead, as if a swarm of locusts had eaten their way across them.  Greenness was vanishing.  Houses were becoming untenanted; there were holes in the walls of many of them, through which one gained glimpses of the sky.  Here, by the road-side, we passed a cluster of insignificant graves.  Then, almost without warning, the barbed-wire entanglements commenced, and the miles and miles of abandoned trenches.  This, not a year ago from the day on which I write, was the Hun’s country.  Last spring, in an attempt to straighten his line, he retreated from it.  Our offensives on the Somme had converted his Front into a dangerous salient.

We are slowing down; the road is getting water-logged and full of holes.  The skull of a dead town grows up on the horizon.  Even at this distance the light behind empty windows glares malevolently like the nothingness in vacant sockets.  A horror is over everything.  The horror is not so much due to the destruction as to the total absence of any signs of life.  One man creeping through the landscape would make it seem more kindly.  I have been in desolated towns often, but there were always the faces of our cheery Tommies to smile out from cellars and gaps in the walls.  From here life is banished utterly.  The battle-line has retired eastward; one can hear the faint rumble of the guns at times.  No civilian has come to re-inhabit this unhallowed spot.

We enter what were once its streets.  They are nothing now but craters with boards across them.  On either side the trees lie flat along the ground, sawn through within a foot of the roots.  What landmarks remain are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling roofs.  The entire place must have been given over to explosion and incendiarism before the Huns departed.  One stands in awe of such completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by the term “frightfulness.”  As far as eye can reach there is nothing to be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered with a green slime where water has accumulated.  This is not the unavoidable ruin of shell-fire.  No battle was fought here.  The demolition was the wanton spite of an enemy who, because he could