Looking at Fey from the end of the village street, I slowly realized that it was not without inhabitants.  Wandering through the grass, scurrying over the rubbish heaps, running in and out of the crumbling thresholds were thousands and thousands of rats.

Across the bright sky came a whirring hum, the sound of the motors of aeroplanes on the way to bombard the railroad station at Metz.  I looked up, but there was nothing to be seen.  The humming died away.  The bent signpost at the corner of the deserted moorland road, with its arrow and its directions, somehow seemed a strange, shadowy symbol of the impossibility of the attainment of many human aspirations.

Chapter V

The Trenches In The “Wood Of Death”

So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical, moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlessly tested in its fiery furnace.  A future historian may find the war more interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, than as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife.  There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the continuous and multitudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a thousand channels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of the zone of violence.

By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being, admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties, organizations, and inventions—­trench warfare.  The principal element of this modern warfare is lack of mobility.

The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since the establishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of either combatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities.  The fierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions, averaging a mile each way behind No Man’s Land.  This stationary character has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all its ancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun, and has turned it into the national business.  I dislike to use the word “business,” with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I intend rather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds—­the idea of a great intricate organization with a corporate volition.  The war of to-day is a business, the people are the stockholders, and the object of the organization is the wisest application of violence to the enemy.

To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, special narrow-gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the railroad station at the edge of the shell zone to the artillery positions.  To this end the trenches have been gathered into a special telephone system so that General Joffre at Chantilly can talk to any officers or soldiers anywhere along the great swathe.  The food, supplies, clothing, and ammunition are delivered every day at the gate of the swathe, and calmly redistributed to the trenches by a sort of military express system.