ew in the ditches gave out a rank,
heavy smell. Wild flowers grew triumphantly over the piles of
rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours
came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the
Germans did to it.

Claude paused before a little shanty built against a
half-demolished brick wall. A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with
a canary, singing beautifully. An old woman was working in the
garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster the rain had
washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops
and neat lettuce heads. Claude approached her, touched his
helmet, and asked her how one could find the way to the Red
Cross.

She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow. "Vous
savez le tank Anglais? Non? Marie, Marie!"

(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way
or that from a disabled British tank that had been left on the
site of the old town hall.)

A little girl ran out of the barrack, and her grandmother told
her to go at once and take the American to the Red Cross. Marie
put her hand in Claude's and led him off along one of the paths
that wound among the rubbish. She took him out of the way to show
him a church,--evidently one of the ruins of which they were
proudest,--where the blue sky was shining through the white
arches. The Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a
little foot sticking to her robe showed where the infant Jesus
had been shot away.

"Le bebe est casse, mais il a protege sa mere," Marie explained
with satisfaction. As they went on, she told Claude that she had
a soldier among the Americans who was her friend. "Il est bon, il
est gai, mon soldat," but he sometimes drank too much alcohol,
and that was a bad habit. Perhaps now, since his comrade had
stepped into a cellar hole Monday night while he was drunk, and
had been drowned, her "Sharlie" would be warned and would do
better. Marie was evidently a well brought up child. Her father,
she said, had been a schoolmaster. At the foot of the convent
hill, she turned to go home. Claude called her back and awkwardly
tried to give her some money, but she thrust her hands behind her
and said resolutely, "Non, merci. Je n'ai besoin de rien," and
then ran away down the path.

As he climbed toward the top of the hill he noticed that the
ground had been cleaned up a bit. The path was clear, t