It is an amusing fact that although each detail of officers delegated to escort the party “to the front” received the most explicit instructions from their superior officers to take the party only to the quiet sectors where there was no fighting going on, each detail from the three governments successively brought the party directly under shell-fire, and each on the first day of the “inspection.”  It was unconsciously done:  the officers were as much amazed to find themselves under fire as were the members of the party, except that the latter did not feel the responsibility to an equal degree.  The officers, in each case, were plainly worried:  the editors were intensely interested.

They were depressing trips through miles and miles of devastated villages and small cities.  From two to three days each were spent in front-line posts on the Amiens-Bethune, Albert-Peronne, Bapaume-Soissons, St. Mihiel, and back of the Argonne sectors.  Often, the party was the first civilian group to enter a town evacuated only a week before, and all the horrible evidence of bloody warfare was fresh and plain.  Bodies of German soldiers lay in the trenches where they had fallen; wired bombs were on every hand, so that no object could be touched that lay on the battle-fields; the streets of some of the towns were still mined, so that no automobiles could enter; the towns were deserted, the streets desolate.  It was an appalling panorama of the most frightful results of war.

The picturesqueness and romance of the war of picture books were missing.  To stand beside an English battery of thirty guns laying a barrage as they fired their shells to a point ten miles distant, made one feel as if one were an actual part of real warfare, and yet far removed from it, until the battery was located from the enemy’s “sausage observation”; then the shells from the enemy fired a return salvo, and the better part of valor was discretion a few miles farther back.

Bok was standing talking to the commandant of one of the great French army supply depots one morning.  He was a man of forty; a colonel in the regular French army.  An erect, sturdy-looking man with white hair and mustache, and who wore the single star of a subaltern on his sleeve, came up, saluted, delivered a message, and then asked: 

“Are there any more orders, sir?”

“No,” was the reply.

He brought his heels together with a click, saluted again, and went away.

The commandant turned to Bok with a peculiar smile on his face and asked: 

“Do you know who that man is?”

“No,” was the reply.

“That is my father,” was the answer.

The father was then exactly seventy-two years old.  He was a retired business man when the war broke out.  After two years of the heroic struggle he decided that he couldn’t keep out of it.  He was too old to fight, but after long insistence he secured a commission.  By one of the many curious coincidences of the war he was assigned to serve under his own son.