ry between Marne and Meuse is one of the regions on which
German fury spent itself most bestially during the abominable
September days. Half way between Chalons and Sainte Menehould we
came on the first evidence of the invasion: the lamentable ruins of
the village of Auve. These pleasant villages of the Aisne, with
their one long street, their half-timbered houses and high-roofed
granaries with espaliered gable-ends, are all much of one pattern,
and one can easily picture what Auve must have been as it looked
out, in the blue September weather, above the ripening pears of its
gardens to the crops in the valley and the large landscape beyond.
Now it is a mere waste of rubble [Page 58] and cinders, not one
threshold distinguishable from another. We saw many other ruined
villages after Auve, but this was the first, and perhaps for that
reason one had there, most hauntingly, the vision of all the
separate terrors, anguishes, uprootings and rendings apart involved
in the destruction of the obscurest of human communities. The
photographs on the walls, the twigs of withered box above the
crucifixes, the old wedding-dresses in brass-clamped trunks, the
bundles of letters laboriously written and as painfully deciphered,
all the thousand and one bits of the past that give meaning and
continuity to the present--of all that accumulated warmth nothing was
left but a brick-heap and some twisted stove-pipes!

As we ran on toward Sainte Menehould the names on our map showed us
that, just beyond the parallel range of hills six or seven miles to
the north, the two armies lay interlocked. But we heard no cannon
yet, and the first visible evidence of the nearness of the struggle
was the encounter, at a bend of the road, of a long line of
grey-coated figures tramping toward us between the bayonets of their
captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh "bag" from the hills, of
a fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-worn than one
could have wished. Their broad blond faces were meaningless,
guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy: they seemed none too sorry
for their fate.

Our pass from the General Head-quarters carried us to Sainte
Menehould on the edge of the Argonne, where we had to apply to the
Head-quarters of the division for a farther extension. The Staff are
lodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, where
offices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, and
where, sitting in a bare passage