Letters from France | Page 7

faint markings upon the
surface of Mars. But to all intents and purposes that country is as much
cut off from you as is the farthest star.
For the war in which we are engaged means this--that you may travel
from any part of the world with the freedom of this twentieth century
and all its conveniences, until you come to the place where we are
to-day. But, when you come thus far, there is a line in front of you
which no power that has yet been produced in this world, from its
creation to the present day--not all the money nor all the invention--not
all the parliamentarians nor the philosophers--not all the socialism nor
the autocracy, the capital, nor the labour, the brain, nor the physical
power in the whole world has yet been able to pass. The German nation,
for reasons of its own, has put this line across another people's country
and made a fool of all the progress and civilisation on which we relied
so confidently up to a couple of years ago. I suppose it will all grow
unbelievable again some day--two hundred years hence they will smile
at such talk just as we did two years ago. But it will be as true then as it
is to-day--that a nation of officials and philosophers gone mad has been
able to place across the world a line which no man can at present move.
I have seen that line at a fair number of places--since writing these
words, many miles away in my billet, working in the brick-floored
cottage bedroom by the light of an oil lamp, I have stepped to the door,
and there I can see it now, always flickering and flashing like faint
summer lightning under the clouds on the horizon. When you come to
the very limit--to the farthest point which you or any man on earth can
possibly reach by yourself--it is just a strip of green grass from twenty
to four hundred yards wide, straggling across France and Belgium from
the sea to the Swiss border. I suppose that French and English men
have sanctified every part of that narrow ribbon by dying there. But the
grass of those old paddocks grows unkempt like a shock head of hair.
And it has covered with a kindly mantle most of the terrible relics of
the past. A tuft, perhaps thicker than the rest, is all that marks where
last year lay a British soldier whose death represented the latest effort
of the world to cross the line the Germans laid.

You cannot even know what is going on in the country beyond that line.
You have to build up a science for deducing it from little signs, as a
naturalist might study the habits of a nest of ants. The Germans are
probably much more successful at that than we are.
It is strange to us that there are towns and cities over there only a few
miles away from us, and for a hundred miles back from that, of whose
life we know nothing except that they have been ravished and ruined by
the heavy hand of Prussian militarism. But, for the people who live
around us here, it is a tragedy of which I had not the least conception
until I actually saw it.
We had a cup of coffee the other day in the house of an old lady whose
husband had been called out two years ago, a few days after the war
began.
"All my own people are over there, monsieur," she said, nodding her
head towards the lines. "They were all living in the invaded country,
and I have not heard of them for eighteen months. I do not know
whether they are alive or dead. I only know that they are all ruined.
They were farmers, monsieur, comfortably off on a big farm. But
consider the fines that the Boches have put upon the country.
"The only thing we know, monsieur, it was from a cousin who was
taken prisoner by the Boches. You know we are allowed to write to the
prisoners, and they have the privilege to write to people in the invaded
country. So my family wrote to my cousin to ask news of my mother,
who was a very old woman. And after weeks and weeks the answer
came back--'Mother dead.'
"It was not so terrible that, monsieur, because my mother was old. But
then--he who was my dear friend," she always referred to her husband
by this term, "my dear friend used to write to us every day in those
times. He was fighting in Alsace, monsieur, and for his bravery he had
been promoted upon the field of battle to be an officer. He wrote every
single