he sighed, "but they left their dead
in our care. You see those flowers on their graves? It is we who put
them there, and the children tend them every day. If you come back next
year, it will be the same. We shall not forget."

"A great statesman paid us a visit not long after Nesle was liberated,"
our officer guide took up the story. "He had heard what the Tommies did,
and he was not quite sure if they were justified. 'After all, German or
not German, a tomb is a tomb, and the dead are dead,' he argued. But
when he saw the cemetery of another place not far away, where the bodies
of Frenchmen--yes, and women and little babies!--still lay where Germans
had thrown them in stealing their graves, the grand old man's blood
rushed to his head. He was no longer uncertain if the Tommies were
right. He was certain they had done well; and in his red rage he, with
his own hands, tore down thirty of the lying tombstones."

Oh, the silence of these dead towns that the Germans have killed with
bombs and burning! _You_ know what it is like, Padre, because you have
passed behind the veil and have knowledge beyond our dreaming: but to me
it is a _triste revelation_. I never realized before what the words
"dead silence" could mean. It is a silence you _hear_. It cries out as
the loudest voice could not cry. It makes you listen--listen for the
pleasant, homely sounds you've always associated with human habitations:
the laughter of girls, the shouts of schoolboys, the friendly barking of
dogs. But you listen in vain. You wonder if you are deaf--if other
people are hearing what you cannot hear: and then you see on each face
the same blank, listening look that must be on your own. I think a night
at Chauny, or Jussy, might drive a weak woman mad. But--I haven't come
to Chauny or Jussy yet! After Nesle we arrived at Ham, with its canal
and its green, surrounding marshes.

Ham has ceased to be silent. There are some houses left, and to those
houses people have come back. Shops have reopened, as at Noyon, where
the French Government has advanced money to the business men. We drove
into the town of Ham (what is left of it!) just as we were hating
ourselves for being hungry. It is sordid and dreadful to be hungry in
the midst of one's rage and grief and pity--to want to eat in a place
like Ham, where one should wish to absorb nothing but history; yet our
officer guide, who has helped make a good deal of history since 1914,
seemed to think lunc