I wonder how many people, searching for news of heroic bayonet charges or for thrilling stories of how Private John Smith kept an army corps at bay, single-handed, with a smile on his face, saw even faintly and from afar the flight of all the fugitives from that stricken zone, the terror of women and children trapped in its hell-fire, and the hideous obscenity of that long track across the fields of France, where dead bodies lay rotting in the rain and sun and the homesteads of a simple people lay in heaps from Artois to Lorraine?

Along the valley of the Aisne and of the Vesle the spirit of destruction established its kingdom.  It was a valley of death.  In the official reports only a few villages were mentioned by name, according to their strategical importance, but there were hundreds of hamlets, unrecorded in dispatches, which were struck by death and became the charnel-houses of bones and ruins.

In the single district of Vie-sur-Aisne, the little communities of Saconin, Pernant, Ambleny, and Ressons—­beautiful spots in old days of peace, where Nature displayed all her graciousness along the winding river and where Time itself seemed to slumber—­French soldiers stared upon broken roofs, shattered walls, and trampled gardens, upon the twisted iron of ploughs and the broken woodwork of farmers’ carts, and all the litter of war’s ruthless damage.  Week after week, turn and turn about, German, French, and British shells crashed over these places, making dust and ashes of them.  Peasants who clung to their cots, hid in their cellars and at last fled, described all this in a sentence or two when I questioned them.  They had no grievance even against fate—­their own misery was swallowed up in that of their neighbours; each family knew a worse case than its own, and so, with a shake of the head, they said there were many who suffered these things.

Shopkeepers and peasants of Celles, of Conde, of Attichy, along the way to Berry-au-Bac and from Billy to Sermoise, all those who have now fled from the Valley of the Vesle and the valley of the Aisne had just the same story to tell—­monotonous, yet awful because of its tragedy.  It was their fate to be along the line of death.  One old fellow who came from Vailly had lived for two months in a continual cannonade.  He had seen his little town taken and retaken ten times in turn by the French and the Germans.

When I heard of this eye-witness I thought:  “Here is a man who has a marvellous story to tell.  If all he has seen, all the horrors and heroism of great engagements were written down, just as he describes them in his peasant speech, it would make an historic document to be read by future generations.”

But what did he answer to eager questions about his experience?  He was hard of hearing and, with a hand making a cup for his right ear, stared at me a little dazed.  He said at last, “It was difficult to get to sleep.”