l--and there must be many
old-time sceptics who believe now not in one but in a hundred
thousand devils--how the old rogue must chuckle at such words!

13

It was astounding to any student of psychology wandering in the war
zone to see how many of the peasants of France clung to their
houses, in spite of all their terror of German shells and German
soldiers. When in the first month of 1915 the enemy suddenly
swarmed over the ridges of Cuffies and Crouy, to the north of
Soissons, and with overwhelming numbers smashed the French
back across the Aisne at a time, when the rising of the river had
broken many pontoon bridges, so that the way of escape was almost
cut off, they drove out crowds of peasant folk who had remained
along this fifteen miles of front until actually shelled out in that last
attack which put the ruins of their houses into the hands of the
Germans. As long as three months before Crouy itself had been a
target for the enemy's guns, so that hardly a cottage was standing
with solid walls.

Nevertheless, with that homing instinct which is the strongest emotion
in the heart of the French peasant, many of the inhabitants had been
living an underground life in their cellars, obtaining food from French
soldiers and cowering close together as shells came shrieking
overhead, and as the shattered buildings collapsed into greater ruin.

So it was in Rheims and Arras and other towns which were not
spared in spite of the glories of an architecture which can never be
rebuilt in beauty. Only a few days before writing these lines, I stood on
the edge of the greatest battlefield in France and from an observation
post perched like an eyrie in a tree above the valley, looked across to
the cathedral of Rheims, that shrine of history, where the bones of
kings lie, and where every stone speaks of saints and heroes and a
thousand years of worship. The German shells were still falling about
it, and its great walls stood grim and battered in a wrack of smoke.
For nine months the city of Rheims has suffered the wounds of war.
Shrapnel and air-bombs, incendiary shells and monstrous marmites
had fallen within its boundaries week by week; sometimes only one or
two on an idle day, sometimes in a raging storm of fire, but always
killing a few more people, always shattering another house or two,
always spoiling another bit of sculptured beauty. Nevertheless, there
were thousands of citizens, women as well as men, who would not