the boyish good nature
which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue, they
stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges. They were
burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans. The dead had
been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while the battle line rolled
northward, clear across France.

We turned back toward Crepy, passing again through the shattered village
of Betz. For three days it had been the centre of a battle, the two
forces lying outside it and shelling each other across the town. The
main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on
the edge of the ravine smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood
about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over and over again
what they had seen.

Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked and thrashed,
past the carcasses of horses sprawled stiff-legged in the ditch or in
the stubble, we tramped on to Crepy-en-Valois. The country was empty,
scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled back again, and
now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon
to the north. The little hotel across from the railroad station in
Crepy had kept open through it all. It was the typical Hotel de la Gare
of these little old towns--a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a
few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets
and under a feather bed. They were used to change, and the mere coming
of armies could not be permitted to derange them.

Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs had been crowded
with English soldiers in retreat; then with Germans--stern, on edge,
sure of being in Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans falling
back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing French.
And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that kept
pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could hobble
over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down.

Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive
unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go galloping away,
leaving a laugh and a few sous behind. Madame would come in from the
kitchen, raise her arms and sigh something about closing their doors,
but, after all, they knew they should keep right on giving as long as
they had anything to give