Yet I picked them up and stared at them and seemed to come closer into touch with the tragedy which, for the most part, up to now, I could only guess at by the flight of fugitives, by the backwash of wounded, by the destruction of old houses, and by the silence of abandoned villages.  Not yet had I seen the real work of war, or watched the effects of shell-fire on living men.  I was still groping towards the heart of the business and wandering in its backyards.

I came closer to the soul of war on a certain Sunday in September.  By that time the enemy’s retreat had finished and the German army under General von Kluck was at last on the other side of the Aisne, in the strongholds of the hills at which the French and British guns were vainly battering at the beginning of a long and dreary siege against entrenched positions.

All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines, stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon and Soissons, where for six days without an hour’s pause one of the greatest battles in history had continued.

As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crepy-en-Valois, which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked the air with thunderous reverberations.

Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease.  In those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature—­the spirit of these woods and hills—­listened with strained ears and a frightened hush for the next report.  It came louder as I advanced nearer to the firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills were falling into the deepest valleys.  They were answered by vague, distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the enemy’s guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they could not find the range of our own artillery.

Presently, as I tramped on, splashing through water-pools and along rutty tracks ploughed up by the wheels of gun carriages, I heard the deeper, more sonorous booming of different guns, followed by a percussion of the air as though great winds were rushing into void spaces.  These strange ominous sounds were caused by the heavy pieces which the enemy had brought up to the heights above the marshlands of the Aisne—­the terrible 11-inch guns which outranged all pieces in the French or British lines.  With that marvellous foresight which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris.  The Germans even then were preparing a safe place of retreat for themselves in case their grand coup should fail, and our British troops had to suffer from this organization on the part of an enemy which was confident of victory but remembered the need of a safe way back.