Ahead, to the right, one caught the glint of a French infantry's red trousers. A man was lying there, face downward, on the field. Then across the open space appeared another—and another—they were scattered all over that field, bright as the red poppies which were growing in the stubble and as still. They were in various positions. One lay on his back, with one knee raised like a man day-dreaming and looking up at the sky. Another was stretched stiff, with both hands clinched over his chest. One lay in the ditch close beside us, his head jammed into the muddy bank just as he had dived there in falling; another gripped a cup in one hand and a spoon in the other, as if, perhaps, he might have tried to feed himself in the long hours after the battle rolled on and left them there.
All these were French, but just at the edge of the thick timber was a heap—one could scarcely say of Germans, so utterly did the gray, sodden faces and sodden, gray uniforms merge into anonymity. A squad of French soldiers appeared at a turn in the road. Two officers rode beside them, and they were just moving off across the fields carrying shovels instead of rifles. Looking after them, beyond the belt of timber, one could see other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to the left, and here and there smoke. Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms. With the boyish good nature which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue, they stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges. They were burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans. The dead had been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while the battle line rolled northward, clear across France.
We turned back toward Crepy, passing again through the shattered village of Betz. For three days it had been the centre of a battle, the two forces lying outside it and shelling each other across the town. The main street, now full of French soldiers, was in ruins, the church on the edge of the ravine smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over and over again what they had seen.
Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked and thrashed, past the carcasses of horses sprawled stiff-legged in the ditch or in the stubble, we tramped on to Crepy-en-Valois. The country was empty, scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled back again, and now was thundering, foot by foot, farther and farther below the horizon to the north. The little hotel across from the railroad station in Crepy had kept open through it all. It was the typical Hotel de la Gare of these little old towns—a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets and under a feather bed. They were used to change, and the mere coming of armies could not be permitted to derange them.
Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs had been crowded with English soldiers in retreat; then with Germans—stern, on edge, sure of being in Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans falling back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and then the pursuing French. And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that kept pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could hobble over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down.
Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go galloping away, leaving a laugh and a few sous behind. Madame would come in from the kitchen, raise her arms and sigh something about closing their doors, but, after all, they knew they should keep right on giving as long as they had anything to give. One of their daughters, a strapping, light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things they had seen as she paused in the hall after preparing our rooms. Her sister stood beside her, and together they declaimed in an inimitable sort of recitative.
How the English soldiers had come in, all laughing, and the young officers so handsome; but the German soldiers were all like this—and the young woman gave a quick gesture as of one taking nose and mouth in her hand and pulling it stiffly down a bit. The French officers and their men were like fathers and sons, but the Germans had a discipline you would not believe—she had seen one officer strike a man with his whip, she said, because he was not marching fast enough, and another, when a soldier had come too near, had kicked him. And they all thought surely they were going into Paris—"Two days more," they had laughed as they drank down-stairs, "Paris, and then—kaput!"
You can imagine that gray horde rolling through the streets—narrow, cobblestoned streets, with steep-roofed stone houses and queer little courts, and the air over all of having been lived in for generations on generations. There is the remnant in Crepy of one of the houses that used to belong to the Dukes of Valois, and at the end of one winding street you find yourself unexpectedly looking through a grilled iron gateway into the ordered stateliness of an old-time chateau. On the outward side the walls of the chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or forty feet to the edge of the ravine. What a place to wait for an approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; and the Germans evidently thought so too, for from this part of town they carefully kept away. They burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate as to live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, they pillaged the houses whose owners had run away, and they ordered the town to pay them one hundred thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the fortitude to stay behind were not molested. The enemy were even polite, one woman told us—"Pas peur!" said the officer who visited her house, taking off his hat. On the gate of another house was scrawled in German script, "Sick Woman—keep away!" and as we passed the open windows, sure enough there was the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just as she had been when the Germans came.
On another door we read, also in German script, "Good people—they give everything!" and on several were orders to leave those within alone. And there was a curious and touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute— Schoenen!" chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their lives to the north of us and likely never to see their fatherland again.
Crepy-en-Valois, more fortunate than some of the towns, whose mayors were dismissed for revealing "a lamentable absence of sang-froid," had a mayor who stuck to his post. He was there when three-fourths of the village had fled and, getting up from a sick-bed to receive the German commander, he saw that the latter's orders were carried out, and signed the order for the town's ransom while his daughter held smelling-salts under his nose.