Ten miles in the rear, or even twenty miles, is really a better place to be if you are seeking to fix in your mind a reasonably full picture of the scope and effect and consequences of the hideous thing called war.

Back there you see the new troops going in, girding themselves for the grapple as they go; you see the re-enforcements coming up; you see the supplies hurrying forward, and the spare guns and the extra equipment, and all the rest of it; you see, and can, after a dim fashion, grasp mentally, the thrusting, onward movement of this highly scientific and most unromantic industry which half the world began practicing in the fall of 1914.
Finally, you see the finished fabrics of the trade coming back; and by that I mean the dribbling streams of the wounded and, in the fields and woods through which you pass, the dead, lying in windrows where they fell.

At the front you see only, for the main part, men engaged in the most tedious, the most exacting, and seemingly the most futile form of day labor--toiling in filth and foulness and a desperate driven haste, on a job that many of them will never live to see finished--if it is ever finished; working under taskmasters who spare them not--neither do they spare themselves; putting through a dreary contract, whereof the chief reward is weariness and the common coinage of payment is death outright or death lingering.

That is a battle in these days; that is war.
So twistiwise was our route, and so rapidly did we pursue it after we left the place where we took lunch, that I confess I lost all sense of direction.

It seemed to me our general course was eastward; I discovered afterward it was southwesterly.