AS I GO to and fro in the land I some-times wonder why the Germans keep a-picking on me. As heaven is my judge I tried to tell the truth about them and their armies when I was with them; but then, maybe that's the reason. At any rate I am here to testify that whenever I stop at a place in England or France either a battery of long-range guns shells it or else a hostile aËroplane happens along and bombs the town. The thing is more than a coincidence. It is getting to be a habit, an unhealthy habit at that. There must be method in it. And yet I have tried to bear myself in a modest and unostentatious way during this present trip. If in the reader's judgment the personal pronoun has occurred and recurred with considerable frequency in my writings I would say: Under the seemingly quaint but necessary rules of the censorship as conducted in these parts the only individual of American extraction at present connected in any way with war activities over here whom I may mention in my writings other than General Pershing is myself. Since the general to date has not figured to any extent in my personal experiences I am perforce driven to doing pieces largely about what I have seen and heard and felt.

Particularly is this true of these bombings and shellings. I repeat that I cannot imagine why the boche should single out a quiet, simple, private citizen for such attentions. It does not seem fair that I should ever be their target while shining marks move about the landscape with the utmost impunity. The German has a name for being efficient too. More than once in my readings I have seen his name coupled with the word efficiency. Take brigadier generals for example. Almost any colonel of our Expeditionary Forces in France, and particularly a senior colonel whose name is well up in the list, will tell you in confidence there are a number of brigadiers over here who could easily be spared and who would never be missed. Yet a brigadier general may move about from place to place in his automobile in comparative safety. But just let me go to the railroad station to buy a ticket for somewhere and immediately the news is transmitted by a mysterious occult influence to the Kaiser and he tells the Crown Prince and the Crown Prince calls up von Hindenburg or somebody, and inside of fifteen minutes the hands, August and Heinie, are either loading up the long-rangers or getting the most dependable bombing Gotha out of the sheds.

For nearly four weeks the raiders stayed away from London. I arrived in London sick with bronchitis and went to bed in a hotel. That night the Huns flew over the Channel and spattered down inflammables and explosives to their heart's content. One chunk of a shell fell in the street within a few yards of my bedroom window, gouging a hole in the roadway. A bomb made a mighty noise and did some superficial damage in a park close by. It was my first experience at being bombed from on high, and any other time I should have taken a lively interest in the proceedings; but I was too sick to get up and dress and too dopy from the potions I had taken to awaken thoroughly.

But the next night, when I was convalescent, and the following night, when I was well along the road toward recovery and able, in fact, to sit up in bed and dodge, back came Mister Boche and repeated the original performance with variations.

In order to get away from the London fogs, which weren't doing my still tender throat any good, I ran down to a certain peaceful little seaside resort on the east coast of England, reaching there in the gloaming. What did the enemy do but sprinkle bombs all about the neighbourhood within an hour after I got there? He went away at ten the same night, I the following morning at six-forty-five.

A delayed train was all that kept me from reaching Paris coincidentally with the first raiders who had attacked Paris in a period of months. The raiders covered up their disappointment by murdering a few helpless non-belligerents and departed, to return the next evening when I was present. I was domiciled in Paris on that memorable Saturday when the great long-distance gun began its bombardment of the city from the forest of Saint-Gobain nearly seventy miles distant. The first shell descended within two hundred yards of where I stood at a window and I saw the smoke of its explosion and saw the cloud of dust and pulverized dÉbris that rose; the jar of the crash shook the building. Throughout the following day, which was Palm Sunday—only we called it Bomb Sunday—the shelling continued. I was there, naturally.

On Monday morning I started for Soissons. So the gunners of the long-distance gun playing on Paris took a vacation, which lasted until the day after my party returned from the north. We got into the Gare du Nord late one night; the big gun opened up again early the next morning. I am not exaggerating; merely reciting a sequence of facts.

For nearly two years the Germans had left poor battered Soissons pretty much alone, though it was within easy reach of their howitzers; moreover, one of their speedy flying machines could reach Soissons from the German lines south of Laon within five minutes. But, as I say, they rather left it alone. Perhaps in their kindly sentimental way they were satisfied with their previous handiwork there. They had pretty well destroyed the magnificent old cathedral. It was not quite so utter a ruin as the cathedral at Arras is, or the cathedral at Rheims, or the Cloth Hall at Ypres, or the University at Louvain; nevertheless, I assume that from the Prussian point of view the job was a fairly complete one.

The wonderful, venerable glass windows, which can never be replaced, had been shattered to the last one, and the lines of the splendid dome might now only be traced like the curves of tottering arches, swinging up and out like the ribs of a cadaver, and by a lacework of roofage where thousands of bickering ravens, those black devil birds of desolation, now fluttered and cawed, and befouled with their droppings the profaned sanctuary below. Altogether it was one of the most satisfactory monuments to Kultur to be found anywhere in Europe to-day.

Nor had the community at large been slighted. Everybody knows how thorough are the armies of the anointed War Lord. Relics which dated back to the days of Clovis had been battered out of all hope of restoration; things of antiquity and of inestimable historic value lay shattered in wreckage. Furthermore, from time to time, in 1914 and 1915 and even in 1916, when no military advantage was to be derived from visiting renewed affliction upon the vicinity and when no victims, save old men and women and innocent children, were likely to be added to the grand total of the grander tally which Satan, as chief bookkeeper, is keeping for the Kaiser, the guns had blasted away at the ancient city, leveling a homestead here and decimating a family there.

However, since the early part of 1916 they had somehow rather spared Soissons. But the train bearing us was halted within three miles of the station because, after keeping the peace for nearly two years, the enemy had picked upon that particular hour of that particular afternoon to renew his most insalubrious attentions per nine-inch mortars. Therefore we entered afoot, bearing our luggage, to the accompaniment of whistling projectiles and clattering chimney-pots and smashing walls.

In Soissons we spent two nights. Both nights the Germans shelled the town and on the second night, in addition, bombed it from aËroplanes. It may have been fancy, but as we came away in a car borrowed from a kindly French staff officer it seemed to us that the firing behind us was lessening.

From press headquarters near G. H. Q. of the Amex Forces we motored one day to Nancy for a good dinner at a locally famous cafÉ. Simultaneously with our advent the foe's airmen showed up and the alerte was sounded for a gas attack. As between the prospect of spending the evening in an abri and staying out in the open air upon the road we chose the latter, and so we turned tail and ran back to the comparative quiet of the front lines. A little later a cross-country journey necessitated our changing cars at Bar-le-Duc. The connecting train was hours behind its appointed minute, as is usual in these days of disordered time cards, and while we waited hostile airships appeared flying so high they looked like bright iridescent midges flitting in the sunshine. As they swung lower, to sow bombs about the place, antiaircraft guns opened on them and they departed.

That same night our train, travelling with darkened carriages, was held up outside of ChÂlons, while enemy aircraft spewed bombs at the tracks ahead of us and at a troop convoy passing through. The wreckage was afire when we crawled by on a snail's schedule an hour or so later.

Two of us went to pay a visit to a regimental mess in a sector held by our troops. The colonel's headquarters were in a small wrecked village close up to the frontier. This village had been pretty well smashed up in 1914 and in 1915, but during the trench warfare that succeeded in this district no German shells had scored a direct hit within the communal confines. Yet the enemy that night, without prior warning and without known provocation, elected to break the tacit agreement for localised immunity. The bombardment began with a shock and a jar of impact shortly after we had retired to bed on pallets upon the floor in the top story of what once, upon a happier time, had been the home of a prominent citizen. It continued for three hours, and I will state that our rest was more or less interrupted. It slackened and ceased, though, as we departed in the morning after breakfast, and thereafter for a period of weeks during which we remained away all was tranquil and unconcussive there in that cluster of shattered stone cottages.

Another time we made a two-day expedition to the zone round Verdun. The great spring offensive, off and away to the westward, was then in its second week and the Verdun area enjoyed comparative peace. Nevertheless, and to the contrary notwithstanding, seven big vociferous shells came pelting down upon an obscure hamlet well back behind the main defences within twenty minutes after we had stopped there. One burst in a courtyard outside a house where an American general was domiciled with his staff, and when we came in to pay our respects his aids still were gathering up fragments of the shell casing for souvenirs. The general said he couldn't imagine why the Him should have decided all of a sudden to pay him this compliment; but we knew why, or thought we knew: It was all a part of the German scheme to give us chronic cold feet.

At least, we so diagnosed the thing privately.

As a result of this sort of experience, continuing through a period of months, I feel that I have become an adept of sorts at figuring the sensations of a bombee. I flatter myself also that I have acquired some slight facility at appraising the psychology of towns and cities persistently and frequently under shell or aËrial attack. In the main I believe it may be taken as an accepted fact that the inhabitants of a small place behave after rather a different fashion from the way in which the inhabitants of a great city may be counted upon to bear themselves. For example, there is a difference plainly to be distinguished, I think, between the people of London and the people of Paris; and a difference likewise between the people of Paris and the people of Nancy. Certainly I have witnessed a great number of sights that were humorous with the grim and perilous humour of wartimes, and by the same token I have witnessed a manifold number of others that were fraught with the very essence of tragedy.

All France to-day is one vast heart-breaking tragedy that is compounded of a million lesser tragedies. You note that the door-opener at your favourite cafÉ in Paris uses his left hand only, and then you see that his right arm, with the hand cased in a tight glove, swings in stiff uselessness from his shoulder. It is an artificial arm; the real one was shot away. The barber who shaves you, the waiter who serves you, the chauffeur who drives you about in his taxicab moves with a limping awkward gait that betrays the fact of a false leg harnessed to a mutilated stump.

In a sufficiently wide passage a couple coming toward you—a woman in nurse's garb and a splendid young boy soldier with decorations on his breast—bump into you, almost, it would seem, by intent. As mentally you start to execrate the careless pair for their inexcusable disregard of the common rights of pedestrians you see there is a deep, newly healed scar in the youth's temple and that his eyes stare straight ahead of him with an unwinking emptiness of expression, and that his fine young face is beginning to wear that look of blank, bleak resignation which is the mark of one who will walk for all the rest of his days on this earth in the black and utter void of blindness.

Behind the battle lines you often see long lines of men whose ages are anywhere between forty and fifty—tired, dirty, bewhiskered men worn frazzle-thin by what they have undergone; men who should be at home with their wives and bairns instead of toiling through wet and cold and misery for endless leagues over sodden roads.

Their backs are bent beneath great unwieldy burdens; their hands where they grip their rifles are blue from the chill; their sore and weary feet falter as they drag them, booted in stiff leather and bolstered with mud, from one cheerless billet to another. But they go on, uncomplainingly, as they have been going on uncomplainingly since the second year of this war, doing the thankless and unheroic labour at the back that the ranks at the front may be kept filled with those whom France has left of a suitable age for fighting.

You see that the highways are kept in repair by boys of twelve or thirteen and by grandsires in their seventies and their eighties, and by crippled soldiers, who work from daylight until dusk upon the rock piles and the earth heaps; that the fields are being tilled—and how well they are being tilled!—by young women and old women; that the shops in the smaller towns are minded by children, whose heads sometimes scarcely come above the counters.

You see where the tall shade trees along the roads and the small trees in the thickets are being shorn away in order that the furnaces and the hearthstones may not be altogether fireless, since the enemy holds most of the coal mines. I have come in one of the fine state forests upon a squad of American lumberjacks, big huskies from the logging camps of Northern Michigan, with their portable planing mill whining and their axes flashing, making the sawdust and the chips fly, in what once not long ago was a grove of splendid timber, where beeches and chestnuts, hundreds of years old, stood in close ranks; but which now is being turned into a wilderness of raw stumps and trodden earth and stacks of ugly planking.

You see an old woman, as fleshless as a fagot, helping a dog to drag a heavy cart up a rocky street, the two of them together straining and panting against the leather breast yokes. For every kilometre that the foe advances you see the refugees fleeing from their desolated steadings; indeed, you may very accurately gauge the rate of his progress by their number.

In one lonely little town in a territory as yet undefiled by actual hostilities I went one morning not long ago into a quaint thirteenth-century church. It was one of three churches in the place; and in point of membership, I think, the smallest of the three. But in the nave, upon a stone pillar, gnawed by time with furrows and runnels, I found a little framed placard containing the names, written in fine script, of those communicants who had died in service for their country in this war. The list plainly was incomplete. It included only those who had fallen up to the beginning of last year; the toll for 1917 and for 1918 was yet to be added; and yet of the names of the dead out of this one small obscure interior parish there were an even one hundred. I dare say the poll of the whole commune would have shown at least three times as many. France has shown the world how to fight. Now it shows the world how to die.

But of all the tragedies that multiply themselves so abundantly here in this bloodied land it sometimes seems to me there is none greater than the look of things that is implanted upon an unfortified town that has been subjected to frequent bombings. It is not so much the shattered, ragged ruins where bombs have scored direct downward hits that drive home the lesson of what this mode of reprisal, this type of punishment means; rather it is the echoing empty street, as yet undamaged, whence the dwellers all have fled—long stretches of streets, with the windows shuttered up and the shops locked and barred and the rank grass sprouting between the cobblestones, and the starveling tabby cats foraging like the gaunt ghosts of cats among forgotten ash barrels. And rather more than this it is the expression of those who through necessity or choice have stayed on.

I am thinking particularly of Nancy—Nancy which for environment, setting and architecture is one of the most beautiful little cities in the world; a city whose ancient walls and massy gateways still stand; whose squares and parks were famous; and whose people once led prosperous, contented and peaceful lives. Its Place Stanislaus, on a miniature scale, is, I think, as lovely as any plaza in Europe. Since it is so lovely one is moved to wonder why the Germans have so far spared it from the ruination they shower down without abatement upon the devoted city. It is well-nigh deserted now, along with all the other parts of the town. Those who could conveniently get away have gone; the state in the early part of this year transported thousands of women and children on special trains to safer territory in the south of France. Those who remain have in their eyes the haunting terror of a persistent and an unceasing fearsomeness.

To be in Nancy these times is to be in a stilled, half-deserted place of flinching and of danger, and of the death that comes by night, borne on whirring motors. I walked through its streets on a day following one of the frequent air raids and I had a conception of how these Old-World cities must have looked in the time of the plague. The citizens I passed were like people who dwelt beneath the shadow of an abiding pestilence, as indeed they did.

To them a clear still night with the placid stars showing in the heavens meant a terrible threat. It meant that they would lie quaking in their houses for the signal that would send them to the cellars and the dugouts, while high explosives and gas bombs and inflammable bombs came raining down. They knew full well what it meant to stay above ground during the dread passover of the Huns' planes, when hospitals had been turned into shambles and supply depots into craters of raging fire. Yet there remained traces of the racial temperament that has upbuoyed the French and helped them to endure what was unendurable.

A little waitress in a cafÉ said to three of us, with a smile: “Ah, but you should be in Nancy on a rainy night, for then the sound of snoring fills the place. We can sleep then—and how we do sleep!”

In Nancy they pray before the high altars for bad weather and yet more bad weather. And so do they in many another town in France that is within easy striking distance of the enemy's batteries and airdromes.