"Somewhere in France"—I never imagined in the wildest flights of fancy about war that to gain an objective under modern battle conditions an army has not to lay waste a position a village but practically a country side. You can motor nowadays for hours in the region generally known as the British front, sweep the landscape for miles in every direction, and see nothing but ruins of what used to be human habitations. Your guides point to a scattered dump of brick, mortar, twisted timbers, indiscriminate rubbish of all sorts, lining either side of the roadway along which you are spinning. Here and there at irregular intervals the bare, charred remains of what once were trees stick from amid the debris and the chaos. There is not a suggestion of a standing wall anywhere, nor even of a door or window-frame, and, of course, no semblance of a roof. There are only cellars into which houses, shops, churches, stores, schools—everything—have been thrown into a crazy hold all of a town-wide grave.

"We are now going through," remarks our military chaperone, in conically, and we recognize the name of a place prominent in the fighting during some important "push" weeks or months ago—now wiped from the face of the earth as effectually as if honest French peasants and villagers had never striven through the generations to make a comfortable abode for themselves and theirs. One hopes that the ministering angels permitted them to evacuate the town before their homes were splintered and crushed by 15-inch death-dealing. One wonders how many human remains may still lie buried beneath."  The wreckage of beams. One speculates sandstone. 