And how you do go! By tall poplar trees, by long fields of France. France! Why, the very name is a poem and a romantic novel, all by itself. Lombardy poplars! It sounds like an old-fashioned song.
Through the fields are the long lines of barbed wire. That is where the trenches are. The very trenches that used to defend Paris. Then, after fifteen minutes’ ride, you are where the French stood in defense of Paris.... This is where the Germans were. They came this far. This very road ... these very trenches are where the men were.
But now you see the first town that the Germans bombed. You come to the same kind of houses, blown all to pieces, wreck and ruin everywhere. In one second-story, there was part of a bedstead still left, and pieces of bed-clothes, that no one had taken the trouble to pick up, after the French had come back. I can write about it, and I can talk about it, and you can read about it, until you are old and gray and sit in a rocking-chair, but you could not understand it unless you saw it. Just streets, muddy and deserted, and little graveyards of houses, hundreds of them.
You may not know it, but if you have been in one raid, or one bombardment, where you hear the explosions coming closer and closer, and you shake and shake and tremble and get sick at your stomach, and dizzy, and lose your mind with fear, every moment, you can imagine what it was to these people who had to endure it for hours and days, and finally had their whole places blown away.
Were they running down the road we have been on, when this happened? Sometimes they would not leave, because they did not know where else to go. They could not believe it was true, anyhow, and they stayed and stayed on.
The farther they went, the greater the desolation. They worked in Compiègne and Senlis, and anyone who visited that neighborhood, even as late as 1921, can form a dim idea of what it must have been in 1917. Ruin everywhere, broken homes; furniture in fragments, and scattered. Pieces of everything; clothing, little playthings, bits of lace, scraps of another existence.
To the eastward, the guns were always going. All that part of France was still subject to bombing raids. There were days when it was necessary to take refuge with a little French family, in a bomb cellar. Lillian wrote:
I have been in cellars myself, with a lot of other people around, frightened to death, sitting close to Mama and Dorothy, who had the shakes and whimpered as she used to when she was a baby, because it was so terrible.
They learned a number of things: they learned to tell enemy planes, to know shrapnel by its gray drift of smoke. They did not remain long in that sector—only long enough to get the required pictures. Griffith went to the front line, and made trench scenes—in the line itself. Then directly they were all back in London, in the raids again. Apparently they had not stopped ... they would never stop.
One night when the planes had been over three times, the noise was so terrific that Dorothy suggested they go down into one of the ballrooms. They found English officers and ladies strolling about, calm in their English way, apparently not greatly concerned by the raid which was still going on. Dorothy, nervously watching, saw a lovely girl about her own age, come in. They looked at each other, at first without speaking. Then the girl said: