It was mid-afternoon; and all day, since early breakfast, we had been working our way in automobiles toward this destination.  Already my brain chambered more impressions, all jumbled together in a mass, than I could possibly hope to get sorted out and graded up and classified in a month of trying.  Yet, in a way, the day had been disappointing; for, as I may have set forth before, the nearer we came to the actual fighting, the closer in touch we got with the battle itself, the less we seemed to see of it.

I take it this is true of nearly all battles fought under modern military principles.  Ten miles in the rear, or even twenty miles, is really a better place to be if you are seeking to fix in your mind a reasonably full picture of the scope and effect and consequences of the hideous thing called war.  Back there you see the new troops going in, girding themselves for the grapple as they go; you see the re-enforcements coming up; you see the supplies hurrying forward, and the spare guns and the extra equipment, and all the rest of it; you see, and can, after a dim fashion, grasp mentally, the thrusting, onward movement of this highly scientific and most unromantic industry which half the world began practicing in the fall of 1914.

Finally, you see the finished fabrics of the trade coming back; and by that I mean the dribbling streams of the wounded and, in the fields and woods through which you pass, the dead, lying in windrows where they fell.  At the front you see only, for the main part, men engaged in the most tedious, the most exacting, and seemingly the most futile form of day labor—­toiling in filth and foulness and a desperate driven haste, on a job that many of them will never live to see finished—­if it is ever finished; working under taskmasters who spare them not—­neither do they spare themselves; putting through a dreary contract, whereof the chief reward is weariness and the common coinage of payment is death outright or death lingering.  That is a battle in these days; that is war.

So twistiwise was our route, and so rapidly did we pursue it after we left the place where we took lunch, that I confess I lost all sense of direction.  It seemed to me our general course was eastward; I discovered afterward it was southwesterly.  At any rate we eventually found ourselves in a road that wound between high grassy banks along a great natural terrace just below the level of the plateau in front of Laon.  We saw a few farmhouses, all desolated by shellfire and all deserted, and a succession of empty fields and patches of woodland.  None of the natives were in sight.  Through fear of prying hostile eyes, the Germans had seen fit to clear them out of this immediate vicinity.  Anyhow, a majority of them doubtlessly ran away when fighting first started here, three weeks earlier; the Germans had got rid of those who remained.  Likewise of troops there were very few to be seen.  We did meet one squad of Red Cross men, marching afoot through the dust.  They were all fully armed, as is the way with the German field-hospital helpers; and, for all I know to the contrary, that may be the way with the field-hospital helpers of the Allies too.