We pass by many willows and come to a great marsh.  In a punt on some open water an old man is angling.  We come to fields again, and then to a deep wood.  France smiles about us in the open sunlight.

But towards evening we pass over the border of this pleasant country into a tragical land of destruction and gloom.  It is not only that murder has walked here to and fro for years, until all the fields are ominous with it, but the very fields themselves have been mutilated until they are unlike fields, the woods have been shattered right down to the anemones, and the houses have been piled in heaps of rubbish, and the heaps of rubbish have been scattered by shells.  We see no more trees, no more houses, no more women, no cattle even now.  We have come to the abomination of desolation.  And over it broods, and will probably brood for ever, accursed by men and accursed by the very fields, the hyena-like memory of the Kaiser, who has whitened so many bones.

It may be some satisfaction to his selfishness to know that the monument to it cannot pass away, to know that the shell holes go too deep to be washed away by the healing rains of years, to know that the wasted German generations will not in centuries gather up what has been spilt on the Somme, or France recover in the sunshine of many summers from all the misery that his devilish folly has caused.  It is likely to be to such as him a source of satisfaction, for the truly vain care only to be talked of in many mouths; they hysterically love to be thought of, and the notice of mankind is to them a mirror which reflects their futile postures.  The admiration of fools they love, and the praise of a slavelike people, but they would sooner be hated by mankind than be ignored and forgotten as is their due.  And the truly selfish care only for their imperial selves.

Let us leave him to pass in thought from ruin to ruin, from wasted field to field, from crater to crater; let us leave his fancy haunting cemeteries in the stricken lands of the world, to find what glee he can in this huge manifestation of his imperial will.

We neither know to what punishment he moves nor can even guess what fitting one is decreed.  But the time is surely appointed and the place.  Poor trifler with Destiny, who ever had so much to dread?

A Walk to the Trenches

To stand at the beginning of a road is always wonderful; for on all roads before they end experience lies, sometimes adventure.  And a trench, even as a road, has its beginnings somewhere.  In the heart of a very strange country you find them suddenly.  A trench may begin in the ruins of a house, may run up out of a ditch; may be cut into a rise of ground sheltered under a hill, and is built in many ways by many men.  As to who is the best builder of trenches there can be little doubt, and any British soldier would probably admit that for painstaking work and excellence of construction there are few to rival Von Hindenburg.  His Hindenburg line is a model of neatness and comfort, and it would be only a very ungrateful British soldier who would deny it.