I have been for many strange walks in my life with strange companions, up and down the world, but never have I gone for such a tramp with such a guide as on this Sunday within sound of the guns.  My comrade of this day was a grave-digger.

His ordinary profession is that of a garde champetre, or village policeman, but during the past three weeks he had been busy with the spade, which he carried across his shoulder by my side.  With other peasants enrolled for the same tragic task he had followed the line of battle for twenty kilometres from his own village, Rouville, near Levignen, helping to bury the French and British dead, and helping to burn the German corpses.

His work was not nearly done when I met him, for during the fighting in the region round the forest of Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield, as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops.  Dig as hard as he could my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those brothers-in-arms who lay out in the wind and the rain.

I walked among the fields where they lay, and among their roughly piled graves, and not far from the heaps of the enemy’s dead who were awaiting their funeral pyres.

My guide grasped my arm and pointed to a dip in the ground beyond the abandoned village of Levignen.

“See there,” he said; “they take some time to burn.”

He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a gardener pointing to a bonfire of autumn leaves.

But there in line with his forefinger rose a heavy rolling smoke, sluggish in the rain under a leaden sky, and I knew that those leaves yonder had fallen from the great tree of human life, and this bonfire was made from an unnatural harvesting.

The French and British dead were laid in the same graves—­“Are they not brothers?” asked the man with the spade—­and as soon as the peasants had courage to creep back to their villages and their woods they gathered leaves and strewed them upon those mounds of earth among which I wandered, as heroes’ wreaths.  But no such honour was paid to the enemy, and with a little petrol and straw they were put to the flames until only their charred ashes, windswept and wet with heavy rain, marked the place of their death.

It is the justice of men.  It makes no difference.  But as I stood and watched these smoky fires, between the beauty of great woods stretching away to the far hills, and close to a village which seemed a picture of human peace, with its old church-tower and red-brown roofs, I was filled with pity at all this misery and needless death which has flung its horror across the fair fields of France.