General Foch opened a drawer of the desk and showed me, day by day, the charts of the battle.  They were bound together in a great book, and each day had a fresh page.  The German Army was black.  The French was red.  Page after page I lived that battle, the black line advancing, the blue of the British wavering against overwhelming numbers and ferocity, the red line of the French coming up.  “The Man of Ypres,” they call General Foch, and well they may.

“They came,” said General Foch, “like the waves of the sea.”

It was the second time I had heard the German onslaught so described.

He shut the book and sat for a moment, his head bent, as though in living over again that fearful time some of its horror had come back to him.

At last:  “I paced the floor and watched the clock,” he said.

How terrible!  How much easier to take a sword and head a charge!  How much simpler to lead men to death than to send them!  There in that quiet room, with only the telephone and the ticking of the clock for company, while his staff waited outside for orders, this great general, this strategist on whose strategy hung the lives of armies, this patriot and soldier at whose word men went forth to die, paced the floor.

He walked over to the clock and stood looking at it, his fine head erect, his hands behind him.  Some of the tragedy of those nineteen days I caught from his face.

But the line held.

To-day, as I write this, General Foch’s army in the North and the British are bearing the brunt of another great attack at Ypres.[E] The British have made a gain at Neuve Chapelle, and the Germans have retaliated by striking at their line, some miles farther north.  If they break through it will be toward Calais and the sea.  Every offensive movement in this new warfare of trench and artillery requires a concentration of reserves.  To make their offensive movement the British have concentrated at Neuve Chapelle.  The second move of this game of death has been made by the other side against the weakened line of the Allies.  During the winter the line, in this manner, automatically straightened.  But what will happen now?

[Footnote E:  Battle of Neuve Chapelle March, 1915.]

One thing we know:  General Foch will send out his brave men, and, having sent them, will watch the Louis-Quinze clock and wait.  And other great generals will send out their men, and wait also.  There will be more charts, and every fresh line of black or blue or red or Belgian yellow will mean a thousand deaths, ten thousand deaths.

They are fighting to-day at Ypres.  I have seen that flat and muddy battlefield.  I have talked with the men, have stood by the batteries as they fired.  How many of the boys I watched playing prisoners’ base round their guns in the intervals of firing are there to-day?  How many remain of that little company of soldiers who gave three cheers for me because I was the only woman they had seen for months?  How many of the officers who shrugged their shoulders when I spoke of danger have gone down to death?