“This is the end of the line,” said the Staff Officer, kindest and most patient of chaperons.  It buttressed itself on a fortress among hills.  Beyond that, the silence was more awful than the mixed noise of business to the westward.  In mileage on the map the line must be between four and five hundred miles; in actual trench-work many times that distance.  It is too much to see at full length; the mind does not readily break away from the obsession of its entirety or the grip of its detail.  One visualizes the thing afterwards as a white-hot gash, worming all across France between intolerable sounds and lights, under ceaseless blasts of whirled dirt.  Nor is it any relief to lose oneself among wildernesses of piling, stoning, timbering, concreting, and wire-work, or incalculable quantities of soil thrown up raw to the light and cloaked by the changing seasons—­as the unburied dead are cloaked.

Yet there are no words to give the essential simplicity of it.  It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely as in the Stone Age.  If it goes, all that keeps us from the Beast goes with it.  One sees this at the front as clearly as one sees the French villages behind the German lines.  Sometimes people steal away from them and bring word of what they endure.

Where the rifle and the bayonet serve, men use those tools along the front.  Where the knife gives better results, they go in behind the hand-grenades with the naked twelve-inch knife.  Each race is supposed to fight in its own way, but this war has passed beyond all the known ways.  They say that the Belgians in the north settle accounts with a certain dry passion which has varied very little since their agony began.  Some sections of the English line have produced a soft-voiced, rather reserved type, which does its work with its mouth shut.  The French carry an edge to their fighting, a precision, and a dreadful knowledge coupled with an insensibility to shock, unlike anything one has imagined of mankind.  To be sure, there has never been like provocation, for never since the Aesir went about to bind the Fenris Wolf has all the world united to bind the Beast.

The last I saw of the front was Alan Breck speeding back to his gun-positions among the mountains; and I wondered what delight of what household the lad must have been in the old days.

SUPPORTS AND RESERVES

Then we had to work our way, department by department, against the tides of men behind the line—­supports and their supports, reserves and reserves of reserves, as well as the masses in training.  They flooded towns and villages, and when we tried short-cuts we found them in every by-lane.  Have you seen mounted men reading their home letters with the reins thrown on the horses’ necks, moving in absorbed silence through a street which almost said “Hush!” to its dogs; or met, in a forest, a procession of perfectly new big guns, apparently taking themselves from the foundry to the front?