392	ENGLISHSAGA
over that valley hang the discouraging clouds of confusion;
death also doth always spread his wings over it. In a word it is
every whit dreadful, being utterly without order;- ... at the
other end of this valley lay blood, bones, ashes and mangled
bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly', *
In that place, though only the strongest and most faithful were
gathered there, even the strongest and most faithful were near
breaking-point.
Far from the blood-stained swamp, in the Olympian calm of
G.ELQ^ Haig, with his handsome head thrown back and his
* quiet, confident smile, would make a dramatic sweep with his
hands over his maps to show visiting politicians how he was
driving the Germans back to their frontiers. Mr. F. S. Oliver,
the historian, contemplating the deluge that poured continually
from the skies, admired the serene way the commander-in-chief
ignored the elements and persisted in his attacks. Presently the
distant ridge ^oukl be captured and the plain of Belgium would
open up before his victorious troops. Or so it seemed, looking
out through the tall, rain-spattered windows of the chateau of
Montreuil. The German generals pursued similar visions of
early victory; that autumn Russia, rent by revolution and
anarchy, collapsed before their advancing armies, and in October
the Austrians, believed to be at the last gasp, struck back with
German aid at their Italian assailants and sent them in headlong
rout with a loss of more than half a million men towards the
Piave. These disasters, like those which had befallen Belgium,
Servia and Romania in the earlier years of the war, were attended
by a mass flight of non-combatants—of whole nations on the
trek leaving behind a vast, untidy trail of dying women, old
men and children and the skeletons of starved animals. The
sum total of human misery was past calculation. Men,crueller
than the beasts, grew indifferent to it. German civilians sang
specially composed hymns of hate against England and, in the
most civilised country in the world, quiet, inoffensive English
gentlemen and ladies who had never seen a blow struck in anger
scouted the very mention of peace and spoke of the whole German
race as they would of a pack of wild beasts. Only in the battle-
line itself was there no hatred: only suffering and endurance:
death and infinite waste.
Through the autumn months the "triumphal crawl through
the mud proceeded."  Flemish villages, whose names had never