Monday, August 2nd, 1915
We thought we had to get away. But there is no getting away. One feels it almost more in the country and in the little towns than in Paris, where life, somehow or other, keeps on.
The country stands so empty.
The men are gone. They are gone from the cornfields and vineyards and pastures. They are gone from thatched roofs and tiled roofs. From wide white poplar-bordered roads, and steep cobbled streets, and hill paths that are like the beds of mountain torrents, from the wide way of the river, and from all the little ways of the streams.
The women are left, and the old people, and the children. The oxen are left. The war has taken the horses and the mules.
The great tawny oxen are beautiful, dragging the plough through the red fields, or the load of brushwood or green rushes along the Roman road.
The women trudge beside the oxen.
The old people had thought that they were come to the time of resting, at the long end of it. They had thought to rest, at last, in their doorways. But here they are, out in the fields of their sons and their sons' sons, at work, only vaguely understanding why.