to drive head-on into a stone wall or over an embankment.  From the road above we could see them in the field below, lying like giant turtles on their backs.  In one place in the forest of Villers was a line of fifteen trucks, each capable of carrying five tons.  The gasolene to feed them had become exhausted, and the whole fifteen had been set on fire.  In war this is necessary, but it was none the less waste.  When an army takes the field it must consider first its own safety; and to embarrass the enemy everything else must be sacrificed.  It cannot consider the feelings or pockets of railroad or telegraph companies.  It cannot hesitate to destroy a bridge because that bridge cost five hundred thousand dollars.  And it does not hesitate.

Motoring from Paris to the front these days is a question of avoiding roads rendered useless because a broken bridge has cut them in half.  All over France are these bridges of iron, of splendid masonry, some decorated with statues, some dating back hundreds of years, but now with a span blown out or entirely destroyed and sprawling in the river.  All of these material things—­motor-cars, stone bridges, railroad-tracks, telegraph-lines—­can be replaced.  Money can restore them.  But money cannot restore the noble trees of France and Belgium, eighty years old or more, that shaded the roads, that made beautiful the parks and forests.  For military purposes they have been cut down or by artillery fire shattered into splinters.  They will again grow, but eighty years is a long time to wait.

Nor can money replace the greatest waste of all—­the waste in “killed, wounded, and missing.”  The waste of human life in this war is so enormous, so far beyond our daily experience, that disasters less appalling are much easier to understand.  The loss of three people in an automobile accident comes nearer home than the fact that at the battle of Sezanne thirty thousand men were killed.  Few of us are trained to think of men in such numbers—­certainly not of dead men in such numbers.  We have seen thirty thousand men together only during the world’s series or at the championship football matches.  To get an idea of the waste of this war we must imagine all of the spectators at a football match between Yale and Harvard suddenly stricken dead.  We must think of all the wives, children, friends affected by the loss of those thirty thousand, and we must multiply those thirty thousand by hundreds, and imagine these hundreds of thousands lying dead in Belgium, in Alsace-Lorraine, and within ten miles of Paris.  After the Germans were repulsed at Meaux and at Sezanne the dead of both armies were so many that they lay intermingled in layers three and four deep.  They were buried in long pits and piled on top of each other like cigars in a box.  Lines of fresh earth so long that you mistook them for trenches intended to conceal regiments were in reality graves.  Some bodies lay for days uncovered until they had lost all human semblance.  They were so many you ceased to regard them even as corpses.  They had become just a part of the waste, a part of the shattered walls, uprooted trees, and fields ploughed by shells.  What once had been your fellow men were only bundles of clothes, swollen and shapeless, like scarecrows stuffed with rags, polluting the air.