Dr. Norman Maclean, an eminent Scottish scholar, whose articles from the front have appeared in The Scotsman of Edinburgh, penned this touching picture of the war-devastated Somme region a few days before the Germans again swept over it in March, 1918:

They stood side by side on a heap of rubbish inside the door of the ruined church in the midst of the ruined town—a man and woman garbed in humble, rusty black. The survivors of the erstwhile population were being brought back as shelters were prepared and work provided for them; these had obviously just returned, and had come straight to the church. When they fled before the flood of death, the church stood scatheless, built immovably upon the rock of the centuries. It was a shrine of beauty and a haunt of peace. But as they now stood on the mound of fallen masonwork inside the west door, what they saw was this—the roof lying in an undulating ridge piled on the floor, the sacred pictures torn and tattered; the pillars shattered; the altar buried under a great mass of dÉbris, and a figure of the Christ, uninjured, looking out through the broken arches on the dead town, and on the land beyond, where the white crosses gleam o'er the multitudinous dead.

The man stood motionless, with a face like a mask. But in a moment the woman shook as if stricken by an ague. She turned and stumbled toward the doorway, where there is no door, the tears coursing down her cheeks and a sob in her throat. The man turned and followed her. He took her hand in his, and they walked away with bowed heads in silence. It is strange how the human heart is moved. It was the tremulous face of that black-robed woman, and the lifting of her hands as if to hide the abomination of desolation from her sight, and the stumbling flight from a scene intolerable, that made me feel the horror spread before me. For I saw it with her eyes.

What she saw was infinitely more than what I could see. She had experienced in her own soul that this was holy ground. In happy days of childhood heaven seemed to lie here; she had come hither to be received, in white, into the holy fellowship; hither to be married; hither to dedicate her children at the sacred font. And when the burden of life was heavier than could be borne, how often had she come hither; and as she fell on her knees at the elevation of the Host, the very God seemed to fold her in the Eternal Embrace, and her troubles fled as morning mists before the sun.

And when the war came, and the men went forth, and with them her sons, how often did she come softly to this sanctuary and dip her hand in the holy water at the door and cross herself, and bow toward the altar, and kneel and pray that they might be saved. In and out all day they came then, men and women, and they prayed for their own, and for France, and their prayers were as the moaning of the winds. * * * And now this! Nothing is left. Home and town and children and sanctuary are all overwhelmed in the one flood. And the Christ from the broken pillar gazes upon a perishing world. It is with her as with those of old, who fell under the heel of the oppressor and who cried: "Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation; our holy and our beautiful house where our fathers praised Thee is burned with fire, and all our pleasant things are laid waste."

There is that in man which enables him to meet every blow of fate with unblanched face—save one. When the blow is aimed at his soul, then he shrivels. It was in her soul that this woman was smitten, as she saw the house of her God thus. And that is why there in the land of death the churches and cathedrals are all in ruins. To make the altars of Arras gaze on the clouds and the stars, and make the winds wail through the colonnades of Rheims, was deemed the surest and swiftest way of spreading terror and affright. So the devotÉes of Odin declared war upon God. For a little while the tribal deity and the belligerent dynast reign supreme. The homeless and bereft, the great multitude who are as those standing on the rubble-heap, are verily left with nothing but their eyes to weep with.

It is amazing how soon one gets assimilated to the most horrifying environment. In a few days one can walk through a town which has been turned into heaps without even a shock of wonder, just as at home one reads the war news and the list of the dead without any realization. In these days we need to be stung broad awake now and then. A city in ruins becomes deadly monotonous—until one is wakened.

One day, when the sun broke forth heralding the Spring, the promise of green on a clump of tangled rose bushes tempted me to turn into the garden of a shattered villa. It was as thousands of others: the hearthstones looked upward to the clouds, and the household goods lay piled tier on tier of rotting lumber as floor fell on floor. In the centre of the green a shell hole took my eye, and I picked my way toward it. Out of the earth at the bottom of the hole there obtruded the bones of a man's arm. In haste, the dead had been thrown into the shell hole and lightly covered. And the rains had washed so much of the earth away. And that bone brought the realization that I stood in the midst of one vast cemetery.

Everywhere and all around under the feet are the nameless dead—men, women, and little children. These last are the nightmare of this horror. Formerly nations recovered from war swiftly; the cradles filled up the gaps. But here the children are dead. To the eye of faith the Star of the East shines still with splendor over every spot where a babe lies. But that Star has been extinguished in this region of doom. The altar is buried, the hearthstone is in the rain, and amid the welter of rubbish you can see the children's cots twisted and rusting and woeful. A woman breaking into sobs inside a ruined church door; a body in a shell hole in a garden, a child's cot rusting on a rubbish heap—these open the eyes and make them see.

These things did not come by the arbitrament of war. It wasn't shrapnel and high explosives that wrought the desolation. From the battlements of the old citadel one can see the dead town lie spread, and the houses hit by shells are few and far between. The houses destroyed wantonly by the enemy ere they retreated are easily recognized, for the walls fell outward by the internal explosions. Ninety-five per cent. have fallen outward, and the wall of the church is likewise. This ancient sanctuary was wantonly destroyed by the retreating enemy. What amazes one is the appalling stupidity of such a crime. If the Germans destroyed the town, that was their right, the might of the sword, and their act could perhaps be justified. But to destroy the church is to destroy what even Attila spared, and so outrage the conscience and instinct of the world. There is never an excuse to seek when an outrage is perpetrated by the enemy. A hospital ship is sunk—but, of course, it is carrying munitions! A church is turned into a ruin, but its towers are used as observation posts! Poor little towers in a land of airplanes and captive balloons! If the churches had been spared, as they were spared in the world's darkest ages, humanity would know that the German soul was still alive. But now the world knows that it is up against an enemy that threatens body and soul alike—an enemy that not only kills the body, but destroys the soul! What an amazing stupidity!—but it is through such stupidity that God lays up judgment against the day of wrath.