Then when he went back to fight, he found that a bureaucratic clash had left the soldiers without supplies, or food or ammunition in sufficient quantities to supply the battle needs.  In the bureaucratic clash some one lost his head in the army and ordered the men into their own barrage.  Hundreds were slaughtered.  Thousands were verging on mutiny.  A regiment refused to fight, and another threatened to disobey.  The American ambulance boys told us that the most horrible task they did was when they hauled eighty poor French boys out to be shot for mutiny!  Spies in Paris, working through the mistresses of the department heads, the sad strain of war upon the French economic resources, and the withering hand of winter upon the heart of France had achieved all but a victory for the forces of evil in this earth.

And there we were that summer day, when time and events had changed the face of fate, looking out across the blighted field of Champagne at what might have been the wreck of France.

All is changed now.  At every railroad junction the American Red Cross has built cantonments, where beds and food and baths and disinfecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for the homeward bound soldiers of France.  The American Red Cross has the name of every French soldier’s family that is in need, and that family’s needs are being supplied by the American Red Cross.  And the sure hope of victory has given the leadership of France a mastery of the forces of evil in the lower levels of the Nation’s political consciousness that will make it impossible for the kaiser’s friends, the courtesans, to accomplish anything next winter.

We gazed across the field that afternoon and seeing the blotched acres, weed blasted, shell-pocked, blistered with white trenches and scarred with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and miles, and we thought how perfectly does the spirit of man mark the picture of his soul’s agony upon his daily work.

It was late in the afternoon when we left that sector of the line.  We passed a bombed hospital where two doctors and three nurses had been killed a night or two before.  It was a disquieting sight, and the big Red Cross on the top of the hospital showed that the German airmen who dropped the bombs were careful in their aim.  Gradually as we left the Champagne front the booming guns grew fainter and fainter and finally we could not hear them, and we came into a wide, beautiful plain and then turned into the city of Rheims.  It was bombed to death—­but not to ruins.  Rheims is what Verdun must have been during the first year of the war, a phantom city, desolate, all but uninhabited, broken and battered and abandoned.  Here and there, living in caves and cellars, a few citizens still stick to their homes.  A few stores remain open and an occasional trickle of commerce flows down the streets.  We went to the cathedral and found its outlines there—­a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the pale spectre