had gone.
One shell had fallen through the roof into my bedroom--that was all. But
ah, Madame! _Noyon, pauvre Noyon!_ She was like a corpse. _Ah lala,
lala! Que'malheur!_ The next day our soldiers came. Ah, how glad I was.
And I asked Sainte Claire, 'May I not go to the well and bring up a
bottle of wine?' And she said 'No, not yet.' So we waited, Madame, until
the day of the Armistice. Then Sainte Claire said, 'Now you may go and
bring up all the wine.' And, Madame, what do you think? I went to the
well and I hauled up the wine and out of the hundred bottles only two
were broken." The old woman laughed with delight at the trick she had
played on the invader.

"They never guessed it was there. It was Sainte Claire, Madame, who
saved it. I poured her a glassful and we celebrated, Madame; we
celebrated the victory down in our cave, _ma'tiote Sainte Claire_ and
I."

* * * * *

Mademoiselle Froissart and I left the _Poste de Secours_ one day, and
started for a far away village that was said to be utterly wiped out.
Our drive lay over a terrific road. We crossed a vast sad plain,
intersected with trenches, with nothing in sight but one monster
deserted tank, still camouflaged, and here and there the silhouette of
a blasted tree against the lowering sky. These dead trees of the battle
line! Sometimes, with their bony limbs flung forth in gnarled unnatural
gestures, they remind me of frantic skeletons suddenly petrified in
their dance of death. They are frenzied, and unutterably tragic. They
seem to move; yet they are so dead. And I imagine their denuded tortured
arms reaching toward unanswering Heaven in an agony of protest against
the fate that has gripped all nature.

We entered a torn and tangled forest. The road was narrow and overgrown,
and several times I had to dodge hand grenades that lay in the grassy
ruts. The Ford ploughed bravely through deep mud, skidded, recovered,
fell into holes, and kept on. My attention was so focused upon driving
that I saw little else but the road ahead, though once at an exclamation
from Mademoiselle Froissart, out of the corner of my eye I saw a machine
gun mounted and apparently intact. The motor was toiling, but in my soul
I blessed its regular noise that told me all was well. Leaving the wood
we came to what appeared to be a large rough clearing. There were no
trees--only bumps of earth covered with tall weeds. To our surprise we
caught sight of the