had fallen, leaving the rooms
just as they had always been: the furniture in its accustomed place, the
pictures on the walls. They suggested doll's houses standing open. One
wondered when the giant child would come along and close them up. The
iron spire of the little church had been hit twice. It stood above the
village, twisted into the form of a note of interrogation. In the
churchyard many of the graves had been ripped open. Bones and skulls lay
scattered about among the shattered tombstones. But, save for a couple
of holes in the roof, the body was still intact, and every afternoon a
faint, timid-sounding bell called a few villagers and a sprinkling of
soldiers to Mass. Most of the inhabitants had fled, but the farmers and
shopkeepers had remained. At intervals, the German batteries, searching
round with apparent aimlessness, would drop a score or so of shells about
the neighbourhood; but the peasant, with an indifference that was almost
animal, would still follow his ox-drawn plough; the old, bent crone,
muttering curses, still ply the hoe. The proprietors of the tiny
_epiceries_ must have been rapidly making their fortunes, considering the
prices that they charged the unfortunate _poilu_, dreaming of some small
luxury out of his five sous a day. But as one of them, a stout, smiling
lady, explained to Joan, with a gesture: "It is not often that one has a
war."

Joan had gone out in September, and for a while the weather was pleasant.
The men, wrapped up in their great-coats, would sleep for preference
under the great sycamore trees. Through open doorways she would catch
glimpses of picturesque groups of eager card-players, crowded round a
flickering candle. From the darkness there would steal the sound of
flute or zither, of voices singing. Occasionally it would be some
strident ditty of the Paris music-halls, but more often it was sad and
plaintive. But early in October the rains commenced and the stream
became a roaring torrent, and a clammy mist lay like a white river
between the wooded hills.

Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war.
Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank
up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which
you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you
slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little
donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of