In the wooded country of the two “Lost Provinces” there was but little time or chance to bury the dead encumbering the hills and fields.  Even six weeks after the beginning of the war horror made a camping ground of the regions which lay to the east of the Meurthe, between the villages of Blamont and Badonviller, Cirey les Forges and Arracourt, Chateau Salins and Baudrecourt.  The slopes of Hartmansweilerkopf were already washed by waves of blood which surged round it for nine months and more, until its final capture by the French.  St. Mihiel and Les Eparges and the triangle which the Germans had wedged between the French lines were a shambles before the leaves had fallen from the autumn trees in the first year of war.  In the country of the Argonne men fought like wolves and began a guerilla warfare with smaller bodies of men, fighting from wood to wood, from village to village, the forces on each side being scattered over a wide area in advance of their main lines.  Then they dug themselves into trenches from which they came out at night, creeping up to each other’s lines, flinging themselves upon each other with bayonets and butt-ends, killing each other as beasts kill, without pity and in the mad rage of terror which is the fiercest kind of courage.  In Lorraine the tide of war ebbed and flowed over the same tracts of ground, and neither side picked up its dead or its wounded.  Men lay there alive for days and nights, bleeding slowly to death.  The hot sun glared down upon them and made them mad with thirst, so that they drank their own urine and jabbered in wild delirium.  Some of them lay there for as long as three weeks, still alive, with gangrened limbs in which lice crawled, so that they stank abominably.

“I cannot tell you all the things I saw,” said one of the young soldiers who talked to me on his way back from Lorraine.  He had a queer look in his eyes when he spoke those words which he tried to hide from me by turning his head away.  But he told me how the fields were littered with dead, decomposing and swarmed with flies, lying here in huddled postures, yet some of them so placed that their fixed eyes seemed to be staring at the corpses near them.  And he told me how on the night he had his own wound French and German soldiers not yet dead talked together by light of the moon, which shed its pale light upon all those prostrate men, making their faces look very white.  He heard the murmurs of voices about him, and the groans of the dying, rising to hideous anguish as men were tortured by ghastly wounds and broken limbs.  In that night enmity was forgotten by those who had fought like beasts and now lay together.  A French soldier gave his water-bottle to a German officer who was crying out with thirst.  The German sipped a little and then kissed the hand of the man who had been his enemy.  “There will be no war on the other side,” he said.

Another Frenchman—­who came from Montmartre—­found lying within a yard of him a Luxembourgeois whom he had known as his chasseur in a big hotel in Paris.  The young German wept to see his old acquaintance.  “It is stupid,” he said, “this war.  You and I were happy when we were good friends in Paris.  Why should we have been made to fight with each other?” He died with his arms round the neck of the soldier who told me the story, unashamed of his own tears.