In that quiet half-hour, alone, or with some comrade, like
Frederic Palmer or Beach Thomas, as tired and as thoughtful as oneself
after a long day's journeying in the swirl of war, one's brain roved
over the scenes of battle, visualizing anew, and in imagination, the
agony up there, the death which was being done by those guns, and the
stupendous sum of all this conflict. We saw, after all, only one patch
of the battlefields of the world, and yet were staggered by the
immensity of its massacre, by the endless streams of wounded, and by
the growth of those little forests of white crosses behind the
fighting-lines. We knew, and could see at any moment in the mind's
eye--even in the darkness of an Amiens night--the vastness of the
human energy which was in motion along all the roads to Paris and from
Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every
village on the way the long columns of motor-lorries bringing up food
and ammunition, the trains on their way to the army rail-heads with
material of war and more food and more shells, the Red Cross trains
crowded with maimed and injured boys, the ambulances clearing the
casualty stations, the troops marching forward from back roads to the
front, from which many would never come marching back, the guns and
limbers and military transports and spare horses, along hundreds of
miles of roads--all the machinery of slaughter on the move.
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