“So you wanted to see it with your own eyes,” he said.  He laid his hand upon her shoulder, and she had some difficulty in not catching hold of him and clinging to him.  She was feeling absurdly womanish just at that moment.

“Yes,” she answered.  “And I’m glad that I did it,” she added, defiantly.

“So am I,” he said.  “Tell your children what you have seen.  Tell other women.”

“It’s you women that make war,” he continued.  “Oh, I don’t mean that you do it on purpose, but it’s in your blood.  It comes from the days when to live it was needful to kill.  When a man who was swift and strong to kill was the only thing that could save a woman and her brood.  Every other man that crept towards them through the grass was an enemy, and her only hope was that her man might kill him, while she watched and waited.  And later came the tribe; and instead of the one man creeping through the grass, the everlasting warfare was against all other tribes.  So you loved only the men ever ready and willing to fight, lest you and your children should be carried into slavery:  then it was the only way.  You brought up your boys to be fighters.  You told them stories of their gallant sires.  You sang to them the songs of battle:  the glory of killing and of conquering.  You have never unlearnt the lesson.  Man has learnt comradeship—­would have travelled further but for you.  But woman is still primitive.  She would still have her man the hater and the killer.  To the woman the world has never changed.”

“Tell the other women,” he said.  “Open their eyes.  Tell them of their sons that you have seen dead and dying in the foolish quarrel for which there was no need.  Tell them of the foulness, of the cruelty, of the senselessness of it all.  Set the women against War.  That is the only way to end it.”

It was a morning or two later that, knocking at the door of her loft, he asked her if she would care to come with him to the trenches.  He had brought an outfit for her which he handed to her with a grin.  She had followed Folk’s advice and had cut her hair; and when she appeared before him for inspection in trousers and overcoat, the collar turned up about her neck, and reaching to her helmet, he had laughingly pronounced the experiment safe.

A motor carried them to where the road ended, and from there, a little one-horse ambulance took them on to almost the last trees of the forest.  There was no life to be seen anywhere.  During the last mile, they had passed through a continuous double line of graves; here and there a group of tiny crosses keeping one another company; others standing singly, looking strangely lonesome amid the torn-up earth and shattered trees.  But even these had ceased.  Death itself seemed to have been frightened away from this terror-haunted desert.

Looking down, she could see thin wreaths of smoke, rising from the ground.  From underneath her feet there came a low, faint, ceaseless murmur.