ue cavalry streamed by, with bronzed men who
grinned at the peasant girls, and horses still groomed and glossy. It is
true that in some of these villages mothers of France had clasped
their sons to their bosoms and wept a little over their nestling heads
and wept still more in loneliness when the boys had gone away. The
shadow of the war had crept into all these villages of France, but
outwardly they were still at peace and untroubled by the far-off peril.
Nature was indifferent to the stupid ways of men. Her beauty had the
ripeness of the full-blown summer and the somnolence of golden
days when the woods are very still in the shimmering heat and not a
grass-blade moves except when a cricket stirs it with its chirruping.

Now, along the line of the retreat, nature itself was fouled and the old
dwelling-places of peace were wrecked. Fighting their way back the
enemy had burned many villages, or had defended them against a
withering fire from the pursuing troops, so that their blackened
stumps of timber, and charred, broken walls, with heaps of ashes
which were once farmhouses and barns, remained as witnesses of
the horror that had passed. Along the roadways were the bodies of
dead horses. Swarms of flies were black upon them, browsing on
their putrefying flesh, from which a stench came poisoning the air and
rising above the scent of flowers and the sweet smell of hay in
eddying waves of abominable odour. In villages where there had
been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers
and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramee and Chevreville, the whitewashed
cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the
German soldiers before they were driven out by shell-fire or bayonet
charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin. Here and there a house
had escaped. It stood trim and neat amid the wreckage. A cafe
restaurant still displayed its placards advertising Dubonnet and other
aperitifs, peppered by shrapnel bullets, but otherwise intact. Here and
there whole streets stood spared, without a trace of conflict, and in a
street away the cottages had fallen down like card-houses toppled
over by the hand of a petulant child. In other villages it was difficult
to believe that war had passed that way. It was rather as though a
plague had driven their inhabitants to flight. The houses were still
shuttered as when the bourgeoisie and peasant had fled at the first
news of the German advance. It was only by the intense solitud